From the New York Times this week:
“I was struck by the dry statement that ‘many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons.’ My daughter was among those arrested. She and the people she was with asked each police officer they passed whether he had any objection to their peacefully walking down the street, and were reassured that there was no problem. They were herded into a trap surrounded by police officers… They were taken to a warehouse. The only water was one toilet and one water fountain. They were left chained together in groups overnight, sleeping without pads or blankets. The next day, they were taken to another holding pen, where they again spent the night heaped on a jail floor. They were held for three days and released only when the convention was ending, told that they could cause no more trouble.”
The writer was responding to an article on domestic surveillance and warrantless arrests before the big political convention in New York City in 2004. One could not miss a parallel – the presumption of guilt, the mass detentions without due process, the stripping away of individual rights and dignity – to another, still greater abuse that occurred 65 years ago on this island. Our Japanese American neighbors were detained and relocated not for their actions, but their heritage; their incarceration lasted not days, but years. At the end, the message: “You can go now. You can cause no more trouble.”
Our nation has sought to make amends for the offenses of 1942, first by presidential proclamation and more recently by the establishment of an internment memorial on Bainbridge Island. This week, our community gathered at the memorial site in Eagledale to recall the forced relocation and to honor the healing. Let it not happen again.
The moment could not be diminished by a hateful flier that made its way into Bainbridge mailboxes with peculiar timing last week. In their zeal to absolve the nation of past wrongs, a few retrograde hearts still rely on cherry-picked documents, half-truths and innuendo to explain away the camps as being in the national interest – or somehow in the interest of the detainees themselves. Of course, when the deciding factor is not citizenship but race – “a Jap’s a Jap,” in the famous words of one West Coast wartime general – the oppressor’s standing is as much an accident of birth as the victim’s. And when the rights that make us all equal before the law are gone, only the grace of God decides which side of the barbed wire you stand on. That is why an internment memorial matters not just to our island, but to our nation.
In 1942, our neighbors were torn from their community with no heed to their citizenship, rights or innocence. Sixty-five years later, the news columns carry reports of a government spying on its own citizens, of open-ended detentions, of the denial of due process, of the suspension of rights.
We celebrate the Japanese American internment memorial because our nation is big enough to admit its past mistakes, even if some of its citizens aren’t. We remember the internment itself not because we’ve come so far since that time, but because we haven’t.
