77th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor different than previous anniversaries

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Something is always lost

when the last living memory of an event or an era is gone. Which is why we need to work hard to record and preserve such memories.

Until relatively recently, the last hundred years or so, actually recording things wasn't possible. The advent of photography in the mid 19th century was huge. The addition of movies, then sound, then the ability of the average person to record things, all that matters.

Here's a semi-trivial example: the Moon landing on July 20, 1969. I was 20 years old and had grown up reading science fiction, but I never in my wildest imagination thought we'd watch the landing itself live. And a few hours later when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Again, we watched it live. And we can watch it over and over, thanks to the miracle of recordings and, most pertinently, the internet.

If we only had recordings of [name your favorite historical event here], how amazing that would be!