re: Japanese internment
Just a few weeks after my fifth birthday, in the spring of 1942, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister, and me up very early, hurriedly dressed us, and quickly started to pack.
When my brother and I looked out the window of our living room, we saw two soldiers marching up the driveway, bayonets fixed to their rifles. They banged on our front door and ordered us out of the house. We could take only what we could carry with us.
We were loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families, with guards stationed at both ends of each car as though we were criminals, and sent two-thirds of the way across the country to an internment camp in the swamps of Arkansas.
For nearly three years, barbed wire, sentry towers, and armed guards marked home. Mass showers, lousy meals in crowded mess halls, and a searchlight following me as I ran from our barracks to the latrine in the middle of the night -- in case I was trying to escape -- became normal.
So when I hear Donald Trump's transition advisors talk about building a registry of Muslims and his surrogates using the internment of Japanese-Americans as their model, I am outraged -- because I remember the tears streaming down my mother's face as we were torn away from our home.
My mother was born in Sacramento, my father grew up in San Francisco, and my siblings and I were born in Los Angeles. We were American citizens, as proud of our country as we were of our Japanese heritage. But in the fear and mass hysteria of wartime, none of that mattered. When our government allowed hatred and racism to overtake our values, nothing else mattered.
We cannot allow our country to be led down that dark path ever again.
I am committed to fighting for our values, our democracy, and the moral character of our nation. And I am committed to standing with the Democratic Party against bigotry and oppression for the next four years and beyond, no matter what form it takes. I hope you will do the same.
When my brother and I looked out the window of our living room, we saw two soldiers marching up the driveway, bayonets fixed to their rifles. They banged on our front door and ordered us out of the house. We could take only what we could carry with us.
We were loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families, with guards stationed at both ends of each car as though we were criminals, and sent two-thirds of the way across the country to an internment camp in the swamps of Arkansas.
For nearly three years, barbed wire, sentry towers, and armed guards marked home. Mass showers, lousy meals in crowded mess halls, and a searchlight following me as I ran from our barracks to the latrine in the middle of the night -- in case I was trying to escape -- became normal.
So when I hear Donald Trump's transition advisors talk about building a registry of Muslims and his surrogates using the internment of Japanese-Americans as their model, I am outraged -- because I remember the tears streaming down my mother's face as we were torn away from our home.
My mother was born in Sacramento, my father grew up in San Francisco, and my siblings and I were born in Los Angeles. We were American citizens, as proud of our country as we were of our Japanese heritage. But in the fear and mass hysteria of wartime, none of that mattered. When our government allowed hatred and racism to overtake our values, nothing else mattered.
We cannot allow our country to be led down that dark path ever again.
I am committed to fighting for our values, our democracy, and the moral character of our nation. And I am committed to standing with the Democratic Party against bigotry and oppression for the next four years and beyond, no matter what form it takes. I hope you will do the same.
George Takei (Star Trek fame) sent this out & I thought to copy & paste!
"The echo's of persecution & atrocities, shall not be stilled!"
Part of the Prosecutor's closing statement from the -
Nuremberg Trial.
Lucky FDR and the democrats aren't in power.
It was the War Department that presented this to FDR, Sean....FDR signed a EO, which makes him responsible for it. Now if you really want to get into it as to party, Earl Warren a prominent republican and AG of CA was a strong supporter.
In fact only one person really stood up and decried it, the governor of Utah, who because of his strong stance against it, lost his re election bid.
In Korematsu vs United States, SCOTUS upheld and justified the EO.
No one at all has clean hands on this black mark on our history.
Sorry that should have been the governor of Colorado, not Utah.
Roosevelt made the choice to proceed. Everything else is window dressing,
So SCOTUS is window dressing? All republicans in the house voted for it as well, that's window dressing...LMAO
Accept it Sean, your party doesn't have clean hands at all on this, as much as you'd like them to...
This is something that all of us have to be ashamed of. No one has clean hands over it, and no one really tried to stop it. Like McCarthyism.
I'm glad I found this article - I must have been asleep when it hit the Home Page and got wiped off during my sleep. My only question is what is entertaining about this article?