From George Takei, today. I could not write about this better.
"On this day 82 years ago, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the height of insanity of racism after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, signed Executive Order 9066.
It ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast to be summarily rounded up and imprisoned within 10 barbed wire prison camps, with no charges, no trial, no due process.
One day, a few months later, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them. They stopped up the porch right in front of our window and banged on the front door. My father answered, and one of the soldiers pointed the rifle at him, right in front of us, and ordered us out of our home. I had just turned five in April; it was May when they came to take us away.
My father gave my brother Henry and me two heavy suitcases. And we brought them out onto the driveway and waited for our mother to come out. When she did, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.
That is one morning that is seared into my memory. I will never be able to forget all the innocent people, my family included, who had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, most of who were law abiding U.S. citizens, who were suddenly categorized as ‘enemy aliens.’
Today, I hear terrifying words from political leaders today that once more raise the specter of what happened before, right here in America.
Donald Trump and his allies are talking about rounding up 11 million people and putting them into mass detention camps before deporting them.
There won’t be time for due process, to sort out who is documented and who is not. Homes will be lost. Businesses, too. Families will be torn apart. Lives will be ruined, over fear and ignorance, all to serve the ambitions and agendas of politicians.
I know, because I lived through it.
I say, never again. Not while I have one ounce of fight still left in me.
Join me. Fight this madness. Help keep America from repeating the mistakes of its past."
***
Me, again.
Any time, ANY TIME, any goddamned time someone tells you that some horror- any horror- cannot happen here, cannot happen in the United States?
Not only can it. It probably already _has_.
Any time someone tells you that the good and just people of the United States simply would not, could not tolerate something, go along with something, approve or put up with something?
Not only can they. They probably already have.
History, as has been said by too many people to cite, in too many ways to remember, is a cycle. Peacetime and war, plenty and famine, profit and loss, growth and decline. Personal histories, national histories, global history and very likely universal history- fill with things that come and go and come again- and go.
I shudder to think it, but our nation- and our world- are cycling back toward a harsher reality. One where we are bound together not by the dream but by The Fear of The Other.
I would love to believe that _this_ time, having learned our lessons, having remembered our history_this_ time, we will avoid the worst of it. That we will manage to keep a step or three away from the real muck. Before we cycle back, before, once again, we lean foreward and progress. That we can, having taken our two steps forward, avoid taking that one step back.
I often end these things, whatever the hell you want to call them, with a phrase: "And so it goes." I have been on the fence about this. I like it, but it's not original, and I had been bothered, as it was, I believed, original to Kurt Vonnegut.
It is not. "So it goes" is Vonnegut. "And so it goes" is the late newsman Lloyd Dobbins. Who did the original swiping and updating from Vonnegut. And I got it from Linda Ellerbee, who swiped it from him. So. The hell with guilt, this is now a _tradition_.
And so it goes.
