That’s the Wrong Reaction, Folks

March 11 was a terrible day for Japan, as a magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit off the coast and sent a giant tsunami toward the shore. It was a devastating natural disaster which ground the country to a halt, and also led to an outpouring of support and charity from the USA.

Well, except for these guys. (Photo linked to by Charlie Wright.)

I’ve only offered a link since the picture is a giant collage, but the gist is it’s a bunch of collected Facebook statuses from people maintaining that the tsunami was payback for Pearl Harbor. (If you feel like hatereading, I recommend it. It’ll cure that nagging sense of feeling that people are good and worthwhile.)

Now, let’s break this down. First, Pearl Harbor was 70 years ago. SEVENTY. Let me tell you all something, collection of idiots on Facebook: no one in Japan who watched as their car or house or whatever was destroyed had anything to fucking do with Pearl Harbor. None of the over 9000 reported dead dropped any bombs there back in goddamn 1941. Unless in your Cheetos-addled brains you think Japan also invented a time machine and sent folks from today back to WWII. I can assure you, that didn’t happen. They can invent near-perfect-looking humanoid robots, but they haven’t cracked the fourth dimension.

And I like how so many are all, “Remember Pearl Harbor?” Like A) we don’t, and B) this is germane to the discussion at hand. Like they’re still raw about it personally. I can guarantee all of these folks, save maybe two, were even alive when Pearl Harbor happened. Believe me, I’m not trying to diminish the tragedy of what happened there either, but some 22-year-old dipshit doing the “Facebook self-pose” for his profile pic doesn’t need to be lecturing me about historical karma.

Oh, and about payback? What happened three and a half years later? WE DROPPED TWO NUCLEAR FUCKING BOMBS ON THEM. (Emphasis not to be taken as agreement with the tactic, but simply to emphasize.) Let’s compare the casualty count, per Wikipedia:

• Pearl Harbor: 2459 deaths
• Hiroshima & Nagasaki: 150k – 246k deaths

I hate getting this morbid, but if we really wanna talk about payback, I think we got them back many hundreds of times over. Oh, also: internment camps. If anything, I’d say we overcompensated quite a bit in the payback department. So it really chaps my ass when morons take a tragedy like the tsunami as “payback” when they forgot about all this. It’s like telling someone a neighbor lost his whole family in a fire, and that guy’s response is, “Good. Fucker broke my weed whacker.”

Everyone in this collage should be embarrassed with themselves. Everyone who claims this is an act of retaliation by God should be banished to Hell. Everyone who claims us helping Japan in a time of crisis is bad because we have problems here needs to be slapped. Everyone who takes this tragedy as a signal to whip their patriotism out in a dick-measuring contest needs to have theirs cut off. And most of these motherfuckers need remedial English classes.

And to the guy who managed to simultaneously misspell “Japanese,” bring up God, and insinuate the nukes weren’t ENOUGH payback: Kudos. I couldn’t possibly find a more spiteful human being myself if you hadn’t raised your hand.