FILE - In this Dec. 7, 1941 file photo, smoke rises from the battleship USS Arizona as it sinks during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The coronavirus pandemic is preventing Pearl Harbor survivors from attending an annual ceremony to remember those killed in the 1941 attack. The National Park Service and Navy also are closing the ceremony to the public and livestreaming it instead. (AP Photo, File)

Monday marks an especially meaningful anniversary for me. Early on December 7th, 1941, my future dad, Signalman Scott K. McIntyre, was puttering around just outside of Pearl Harbor on a converted World War I destroyer. He and his shipmates grumbled about having to get up early on a Sunday to go out on patrol–until the captain got the call to return to port. By the time they’d raced back to the harbor, everything was on fire. The only thing to do was push through their shock and horror to rescue as many of their comrades as possible and await their orders.

In response to this attack, here’s what President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t do: he didn’t lie. He didn’t call it a Republican hoax to make him look bad, or tell the people the Japanese military would just disappear. He didn’t send our soldiers and sailors to battle without also mobilizing American manufacturing might to make and distribute adequate equipment for them. He never told the people America was rounding the corner to victory when it clearly was not.

Roosevelt understood the American character. What an insult it would have been for him to assume the people would panic upon hearing the truth, so he told the truth: America was in danger, and it would take a massive, coordinated effort to turn back the enemy. He earned the people’s trust by trusting them with the truth, so they responded. Men like my father and father-in-law, who was a Seabee, went to war. Many women enlisted in the military. Single women immediately went to work in manufacturing, sciences, and technology. My future mother became part of the intelligence network. Women with children went to work after national and state governments established state-of-the-art child care centers, which became models for post-war preschools. Ration cards were mailed to every household; forgoing meat, drinking powdered milk, and enduring rolling blackouts to save energy were a small price to pay to protect one another.

It’s not that FDR didn’t make terrible mistakes early on. He sent thousands of Japanese Americans to prison camps, and they were never compensated for their losses. It took a relentless campaign by his wife Eleanor to rescind the policy of excluding Black Americans from military service, and even then, their opportunities to advance in rank were limited. There were countless strategic and tactical errors, both in the Pacific and in Europe. But we finally prevailed because he listened to people who knew more than he did, he corrected course, and he told the truth. Moreover, he clearly identified the real enemy: not one another or the press or his political opponents, but the Axis nations that wanted to destroy us.

The contrasts with our current leadership are obvious, but maybe it’s not so obvious that the invasion of December 7th, 1941 – or for that matter, Sept. 11, 2001 – is analogous to the invasion of the Novel Corona Virus of 2019. Those other attacks were intentional, after all, and the perpetrators easily identified. But exactly because COVID-19 is invisible, it has been able to gain a strong foothold here, using us to infect one another.

Our “generals,” epidemiologists and other public health experts, warn that there are dark days ahead. Already, we’re surpassing old records for hospitalizations and death. Today’s “soldiers,” our frontline health care providers, face overwhelming odds against the disease. The low death rate quoted by the minimizers is meaningless. In real numbers–real lives–more people are dying of COVID-19 every two days than were killed in the 9/11 attack. Close to 300,000 Americans will have died in the pandemic by the end of 2020. By comparison, between 12/7/1941 and the surrender of Germany in 1945, around 405,000 Americans died of war-related causes. We’re almost ¾ of the way there in just one year.

This is clearly a national emergency. The present national policy of shoulder-shrugging inaction (“death is death; it is what it is”) is wrong in every sense of the word. In fact, we are not helpless, and we’re no weaker or less capable of sacrifice than the Greatest Generation. We’re mainly suffering from lack of care for the common good, fueled by poor leadership. We’ve been told masking up and social distancing are ineffective; inconvenient; difficult; signs of weakness; outright tyranny. They’re not. They’re proven to slow the transmission of COVID-19. They’re simple consideration for the wellbeing of others. They’re an act of responsibility and patriotism.

My dad spent two years fighting in the Pacific. By the time he got back to Los Angeles, his undiagnosed tuberculosis was so advanced, he had to have all of one lung and part of the other removed. Happily for my brothers and me, he lived another 55 years. So little is being asked of us in this time of peril: wear a mask in public and limit social contacts for a few weeks. We can honor the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents by making these small sacrifices to care for one another and literally save lives until a vaccine is available.

Jean Lewandowski is a longtime resident of Nashua.

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