Other than being a beautiful, almost-winter day here in my corner of rural Alberta, December 7th carries a weight that never leaves me. For Canadians, Americans and the rest of the world this date is part of our shared history, a reminder that the world doesn’t fracture in isolation and that we have always stood shoulder to shoulder with our allies when democracy is threatened. Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, December 7th, 1941, the moment the United States was pulled into the Second World War, and the moment the trajectory of the 20th century changed. I debated writing about it at all because I try, so often, to anchor things “at home.” But everything I write comes from my own lived place, memory, emotion, experience, and this date sits at the centre of all of that.
My father, as many who read me now know, shaped so much of how I see the world. Back in 1981, during the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, my parents wanted one final trip to Hawaii, my mother already many years into the paralysis of her stroke. I met them there because my father couldn’t manage the physical care on his own, and because time with them mattered. Two things were important to him on that trip: travelling to the remote resting place of Charles Lindbergh, and standing where the Second World War began for America.
Standing above the sunken USS Arizona with them is something I will never forget. Tourists moved around us, reading plaques or pointing at the quiet water. But for my father, it was not a tourist stop. It was a place of reverence. A place of loss. A place that demanded silence. He stood there as a Canadian who had done his part in those dark years, because it was right to stand with an ally, with democracy, with the world. And I felt that through him. I wasn’t alive in 1941, but I knew the significance of that place because he carried it in his bones.
That’s why it sits so heavily with me that, according to reporting years later, when Donald Trump toured the USS Arizona Memorial in 2020, he asked what it was and why it mattered. The president of the United States standing on the graves of 1,177 Americans and not understanding the meaning of where he was. People say, “Well, that’s just Trump.” But that is the point. When you cannot feel history, when you do not carry its weight, you cannot grasp consequences. You cannot lead through the echoes of the past when you don’t even hear the original sound.
And today, after the United States released its new National Security Strategy, framed against a backdrop of global instability, authoritarian drift, and democratic stress this anniversary lands with a different heaviness. Because Pearl Harbour wasn’t only an American call to arms. It was a turning point for Canada too. My father, like so many Canadians of his generation, believed that when democracy was threatened, you didn’t shrug and say, “That’s someone else’s problem.” You showed up. You stood with your allies. You defended something bigger than borders.
And now, as Americans face a crossroads inside their own country, the echoes of 1941 feel unbearably loud. Not because history is repeating itself, but because, as a historian recently said, it is not repeating. It is echoing, resonating and warning.
I think about my father’s reverence on that platform above the Arizona. The way he held the past with both gratitude and responsibility. And I contrast that with a man who once stood in the same place and asked, essentially, “What is this?”
So maybe it’s an emotional weekend. Maybe it’s Christmas coming. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the weight of watching the world tilt again in ways too familiar for comfort. But as a Canadian who once stood above the USS Arizona carrying the reverence my father carried, I will say this plainly:
We understand, perhaps more than we say aloud, that America’s turning points have always shaped our own, economically, politically, militarily, and morally. Canada has never been a bystander in the currents of history.
The anniversary of Pearl Harbour matters, not just to Americans, but to all of us. Especially now, as we watch a man who has never understood the weight of history wield presidential power without any sense of consequence. The echoes are loud. Please hear them.
Nancy's Notes 