Sixty years ago, The United States of America was devastated by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The unthinkable had happened. Suddenly, from nowhere, death and destruction rained down in Hawaii and decimated our powerful navy. The fabric of daily life had been torn apart. It is well, I think, in this new time of national tribulation to remind ourselves of what followed. Much has been said about the troops who fought and won the war. "The greatest generation," they have been called, but the story is larger and grander than that. The history of the whole nation in the four years of World War II is a marvel of courage, self-sacrifice, good will and cooperation.

For a long time after December 7 the news about the War was not good. There were continuing enemy advances and victories. The Japanese invaded Thailand and the Malay Peninsula. They sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse and were then able to move on to capture Singapore. They took Guam and Wake Island and Hong Kong and invaded the Philippines. On May 6, 1942, five months after Pearl Harbor, General Wainwright and his 11,500 allied troops at Corregidor surrendered to the Japanese. That same month, General Rommel, in North Africa captured Tobruk, a critical supply port for us in Libya, and moved into Egypt. The following month, the Germans began a sweep into Russia, capturing one city after another and crossing the Don River. They opened the siege of Stalingrad on August 22nd. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe continued the air war known as the Battle of Britain, bombing London and other key targets that had been blacked out and under attack since October of 1940.

On the home front, gasoline, meat, and sugar were rationed, obtained only by turning in the coupons doled out by the government. Other food shortages were offset by the families who planted vegetable victory gardens throughout the nation, often in plots of ground set aside by municipalities. Millions of housewives went to work in factories and shipyards and defense plants, or did piecework for the war effort in their homes or churches. With scarcely any visible dissent, the people of America warm-heartedly joined hands to meet the fearful escalating and demanding needs of war.

It was a very different culture in which Americans of that era had been raised. From it's beginning, this had been a religious nation. Prior to World War II, it was still assumed that people believed in God and belonged to a church or synagogue. Divorce was an infrequent phenomenon, imposing a stigma and embarrassment on those who terminated their marriage. Blasphemy was not a fit subject for literature or entertainment. The respect for each other's religious affiliation was so much a part of American life that no large party or public function was held on a Friday which did not include on the menu a fish option for Roman Catholics since in that time the avoidance of meat on that day was obligatory for them.

The family was in 1941 the central focus of daily living. During The Great Depression, it was a struggle to put food on the table and shoes on the children. The whole family worked and sacrificed together to meet their difficult circumstances. Family members were for each other the sufficient reason to strive to make things a little better in their household. Americans who grew up in that affirmative, cohesive, God-fearing culture were well fortified psychologically and spiritually to withstand the rigors of war.

It is our turn now. The whole world has been transformed into a war zone. It is a new kind of conflict requiring weapons, techniques and strategies heretofore unknown. The nature of the military offensive, which delivered the September 11th cataclysm, is as stupefying a landmark in the history of warfare, as was the deployment of the atom bomb. Our enormous defense system had suddenly become ineffective. Today, there is no hiding place.

The enemy we face is not a nation or a group of nations. It is a cult of burning hatred directed against what we regard as the concepts of civilized living. Its devotees are of many nationalities. It mounts a continuous public campaign of inflammatory indoctrination to ensnare young minds and reinforce the passions of older ones. In June, USA Today provided a chilling account of the training of terrorists by just one of many branches of the new holy war, the Palestinian Hamas organization. It is believed that up to twenty young men are constantly available for suicide attacks upon Israelis. "The group also claims to have tens of thousands of youths ready to follow in their footsteps." One Hamas leader, Sheik Hasan Josef, said "We like to grow them from kindergarten through college."

Such cold-blooded training of young killers seems incomprehensible to us, but it is not a new phenomenon. Hitler's elite SS troops were selected as young boys. They were brainwashed until every shred of humane and compassionate emotion had been eradicated from their psyche. They were programmed as robots of blind devotion to Hitler, to the Third Reich and to their superior officers. They were engines of cruelty, treachery and slaughter. Allied soldiers fighting the Nazis eventually realized that the SS troops were androids, not human beings. Of course, the Japanese also had programs of intense indoctrination that produced legions of Kamikaze pilots.

Since the human heart harbors dark passions as well as benevolent ones, a war against hatred can never be won. The most that can be accomplished by our nation and its allies in the long struggle ahead is probably to make the price paid for the fomenting of terrorism so great that the frequency of organized ideological murder and destruction will be minimized. As Americans turn to the huge, perplexing task of containing international hatred, it would be unwise and hypocritical not to acknowledge the great cauldron of hatred which has long been seething in our own society and which we have deluded ourselves into thinking was unimportant.

My first direct encounter with this wellspring of hostility was in 1968. It was an event at The Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge where a U.S. Army Colonel had been sent as a spokesman for a subject of grave concern to The Defense Department. He apologized in advance for the slides he was about to show. They turned out to be the lyrics of the top ten rock music songs. In the aggregate they comprised a broadside against the American society. God, religion, morality, the government, the laws, and the family were scorned, cursed and belittled. The Pentagon was trying to figure out if young people, who are daily immersed in this music of cynicism and hostility toward a civilized order, can measure up to the patriotic devotion and sacrifices that military service requires of them.

In his introduction to Life Magazine's book about the 1960's, Tom Brokaw wrote, "A new form of popular religion flourished, the rock-and-roll church with its nocturnal, narcissistic, anti-authoritarian creed." It is true. For many young people rock music had become a substitute for religion, the dominant influence in their lives. In time, rap music and hip-hop music burst forth, celebrating murder, violence and mayhem. It defies rationality to suppose that young people who have the rock music culture pounded into their minds electronically, via their walkmans and boom boxes, are unaffected by the din promoting anger and hatred.

Columbine High School's Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold and all of America's other young assassins in the schoolyards and inner cities have been as thoroughly trained for their rampages of slaughter as were the Kamikaze crews who turned American passenger planes into mega bombs. The rising tide of self-centered quick tempers that have made road rage a dangerous and sometimes fatal commonplace in our country is surely another product of the rock music culture. Over the last three and a half decades the huge increase in crime, drug and alcohol addiction, family disintegration and the other manifestations of a deteriorating society, have, to some extent, been caused by the intensely hedonistic subject matter of the nation's entertainment. The Pentagon saw trouble coming. Seemingly nobody else in government did. Now, the baleful impact of American songs of savagery has, by the genius of modern communications technology, been spread across the world. I believe it must be admitted that America has become a mass producer of the psychological raw material of hate crimes.

To try to divert the entertainment industry away from the themes it has featured on center stage for years will be a daunting task. It would rate right up there with the labors of Hercules in the degree of difficulty. In the first place the corporate engine of entertainment is immense and fueled with billions of dollars. Its continuous celebration of hate and violence and prurience is delivering tons of golden eggs. The corporate protection of that goose will rival the security at Fort Knox.

Turn the coin over. The generations that consume these products will not readily part with them. Millions of younger people have developed a dependence upon that decibel input that borders on addiction. That primary pastime is a fixture in their lives. Don't touch it.

There is a third obstacle perhaps even more difficult than the other two. The American culture has stripped the gears of public moral judgment. Standards of acceptable behavior are now forbidden. The individual is welcome to do just about anything he pleases without criticism, but if anyone insists that something is good or bad for the public well being, that heretic will be harpooned by the zealots of the freedom of speech, freedom of the press and academic freedom. It is no longer permitted to say, "That thing you are doing is not good, and for all our sakes, please stop." You mustn't say that.

Now, however, that "for all our sakes" has suddenly taken on a specific gravity it hasn't enjoyed in America for a century. All the people of the nation have suddenly been jammed into a single plot of new territory marked with a permanent DANGER sign. As additional acts of terrorist destruction occur here, and in other civilized nations - and they will happen - and as the troubled economy suffers additional reverses, and unemployment rises, all Americans will be subject to new stresses in their daily living. They will not be well served by entertainment that preaches hatred and selfishness and violence. For all our sakes, the vicious themes of pop music should be toned down.

However, much more than muting of the inhumane culture, America needs cultural and recreational nourishment that glorifies courage forbearance, affirmation and loving - kindness. As noted earlier, the generation that upheld this nation so sure-footedly through World War II was the embodiment of Christendom. In recent years, the dominant opinion-makers have decided that the principles of a democratic free society require that the practice of religion be confined to religious sanctuaries and private gatherings. Government and religion have been discovered to be mutually exclusive. Public schools must bar the door to God and his spokesmen. Religion is something you must keep to yourself. Don't splash any on me.

As people who assert this point of view have moved into the leadership of universities, the news media and the other idea industries, a bewildered American populace, uncertain how to argue against the aggressive advocacy of the intellectuals, has found itself living in a public square purged of the healing and purifying influence of religion, even when that same public square is hospitable to, and fiercely protective of, satanic rap music.

This spiritual asphyxiation of American life was blasted from the entire national premises by the terrorists on September 11th. The spontaneous response throughout the nation of prayer and religious services in homes and hamlets, towns and cities by people of every religious affiliation, and the earnest forthright supplications to God, by our President, mayors, governors, and other public officials have opened the gates wide for Americans to reassert themselves as a people of faith. When the American people, massively, publicly and humbly turned to God, the issue was decided in their favor, and the keep-religion out-of-sight people were vanquished. A final comment: No other preparation to defend our nation against its crazed enemies could possibly do so much to safeguard and strengthen us as the public welcoming of God back into our midst.