I've visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor twice in my life, in 1997 and 2016. Each time, the experience was deeply moving and emotional as I choked up contemplating the tragedy of Dec. 7, 1941, that sent 2,403 American sailors to their watery grave.
But both times, I was also struck by the behavior of some my fellow visitors to the floating memorial, who seemed to treat it as just another tourist attraction to check off on their Hawaii vacation checklist. I was struck by the laughing and chatter I heard at such a solemn site. I'll never forget in 2016 seeing people next to me shoot selfies with their cellphones. For them, the victims of the Arizona seemed little more than faceless names, the tragedy itself distant and removed from their understanding.
As the COVID-19 pandemic death toll surges to a point where the number who perish on a given day equals or surpasses the total that perished on that Day of Infamy on Dec. 7, 1941, I'm struck by something else: the parallel between how so many of us are treating the tragedy of COVID and the tragedy of the USS Arizona. For too many of us, the gravity of this loss (nearly 300,000 lives and counting) is simply not registering. The victims are nameless and faceless, except to their loved ones. We can't seem to grasp what these numbers mean in terms of human loss because we don't see the faces, don't feel the pain. Even worse, so many don't even seem to care, more interested in ensuring they are able to live their lives as they always have and rejecting even the slightest sacrifice, even wearing a mask.
For those who spend time at the Arizona memorial trying to grasp what happened that day, there is a powerful reminder that continues to bubble to the surface. For the past 79 years without interruption the battleship has emitted drops of oil that float from its hull to the surface, creating a fresh sheen for all who visit to see. Every minute or two, a new drop appears. During my visits, I found myself hypnotized by those drops. Each drop made me feel that the tragedy of Pearl Harbor was more than a distant, remote, unrecognizable event; for me, it was a symbol of an event that lives on to this day, whose victims continue to speak to us from their final resting place. Legend has it that the drops of oil will continue to float to the surface until the last Pearl Harbor survivor passes away.
Someday, the tragedy of COVID-19 will end and we all will return to our lives. The hundreds of thousands of victims who were lost will be little more than numbers to most of us and our descendants. There will be memorials, as there was to the Arizona. But will we really understand what was lost? Will there be something like those bubbles of oil to make sure this infamous event in American history lives on in our hearts, if not our lives? If we don't get it today in the midst of the catastrophe, how will we ever get it then?
