There is another thread running about the Wichita March, which was written to honor a U.S. Cavalry captain who was injured by an arrow in a battle in 1858. In the battle, 50 Comanches and all of their horses were killed. Somebody posted this response" "What a shameful story."

In this thread, somebody posted a message to commemorate the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and the discussion went on for two messages before somebody brought up the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the U.S. internment of Japanese-American citizens, and God-knows-what that happened in 1973 and 2003 and 2016.

I dunno. Something seems wrong about all that. In the Wichita story, the focus was on an officer who was nearly killed by an arrow and went home to recuperate. His sister wrote a march to honor her brother, and the march was popular for years thereafter. And while the killing of the Comanches was indeed shameful, something seemed wrong to me about what seemed to me to be an attempt to negate the impact of the near-death of the soldier by one-upping his tragedy with a worse one suffered by the other side.

In the Attack on Pearl Harbor, 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 wounded, and 64 Japanese were killed. Most or all of the people killed on both sides, left behind grieving friends and families - and to all of them, this was a horrible tragedy. It is right to recall and study and memorialize this event, especially on its 75th anniversary.

The other events are also horrible tragedies. Each one was a pinnacle of suffering and grief for all the victims. For all of those victims, these events were the worst thing that could ever happen to them. So, I think it's foolhardy to try to negate the impact of an event by bringing up a worse tragedy suffered by the "other side."

Also implied in this one-upmanship of tragedies, is an attempt to comparatively assess blame. Along with that goes an attempt to shame current members of the "other side" for the misdeeds of their forebears.

These are all tragedies, and they should all be memorialized and studied and mourned over - but they should not be compared. And people of the current time should not be condemned for what happened 75 or 150 years ago.

-Joe-