*The following appeared as the Student Life staff editorial two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which many people have compared to Tuesday’s attacks. Cadenza finds these words to be hauntingly true today.

Dec. 9, 1941

For the first time since the second World War began the future course of our nation seems clear and unmistakable. There has been an open and uncalled for act of aggression upon United States territory. American men and ships have been bombed. A formal declaration of war has been uttered. There is no recourse, no answer but war. This will not be another defense of America by aiding the Allies, another campaign for preparadness, another state of national emergency. This will be an all-out call.
Our reaction, as American college students, to the news last Sunday was basically one of excitement. Everywhere ears were bent to radios and discussion was heated. For us, for most of us, it was not a moment of fear or depression; on the contrary, necessity of decisive, the action by the United States was even stimulating. Within the space of a few hours or a few days It was difficult to realize, first, that this war will be long and hard, whether we take care of Japan in one knockout blow or no, and second, hat a prolonged and actual state of war will mean to us.
A new way of life will soon confront us. Heretofore, we have known comparatively nothing of the hardships or war or of adjustments that must be made in living on a war-time basis. We don’t know what it is to subordinate personal wants to the need of a government and army prosecuting a war. We don’t know what it is to work day and night so that that need may be fulfilled. We don’t know what it is to utilize every spare moment in training ourselves to be of some aid in civilian defense–first aid, canteen work, signaling, air-raid protection, mechanics–when called upon. It is to be hoped that we never will know what it is, as one Englishman described it, to have our windowpanes shattered by the repercussions of a bomb nearby, to patiently replace them and wait for the next bomb.
All this, with the fortunate exception of the last, we may have to learn soon. And the national crisis will affect every one of us, directly or indirectly. Directly, it will concern members of ROTC, deferred selectees such as those in IIA classification, men who have just reached the age of twenty-one. Indirectly, it will concern producer and consumer, women and children as well as men, old as well as young.
There can be no isolation now. On May 9, 1941, an editorial of ours, based on a poll of student opinion, was headed “Student Life Opposes Convoys.” In a forum in the May 6 issue, Dean Joseph A. McClain wrote that we should “put up or shut up” on the issue of going to war. This is December 9–and now we’re in it, the only thing to do, in the words of a former isolationist, Senator Wheeler, is to “lick hell out of `em.”
Giving hell to someone else won’t leave this life of ours the earthly paradise it has been. And the sooner we face the truth of the situation, with all that it implies, the better off we’ll be. We have a job to do.

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