We've been here before.....

  

                  guard tower at manzanar internment camp, california                                 

   We've been here before. It is in our story.

     It was this week in 1942 an offense against Asian people  began and it betrayed American principle and idealism.

 

    Immigration is a recurrent political thorn and people suffer. There are seasons of hate and victimhood changes by ethnicity, heritage, and nationality. As violence and animosity toward AAPI peoples accelerate, we recall how the American federal government crossed a line of ignominy. 

     Manzanar is emblematic of the mistreatment of people of Asian ancestry, and their resilient grace in sustaining.  

 MANZANAR

        The National Historic Site is history as a window to our national soul. It's also evidence of a test of civility and a benchmark on doing what we say we believe.

        In this instance it was people of Japanese heritage. We know however, our villainy has been felt by Native citizens, Africans, Jews, Irish, Germans, Italians, Mexicans, and others despite we are a nation of immigrants. Immigration makes us better, and more culturally rich, but our history condemns us.

       The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, followed days later by submarine attacks on central California marine targets unleashed a public mania that empowered a low in American history, the internment of nearly 120 thousand Japanese Americans during WWII.

      The Manzanar Site, ironically near Independence California, tells the history and testifies as to how fragile our civil liberties are.

      Operated by the National Parks Service, the Manzanar Historic Site, 200 miles north of LA, provides an intelligent  account of the life that began there in March of 1942. It conveys emotion.

     10 thousand people lived in 504 barracks the internees built. Tar paper shacks, windy, cold and snowy in winter, blown by sand and sweltering in the 110 degree summers.

   Surrounded by barbed wire, armed guards, and watch towers, entire families tried to make the best of life in a kind of prison camp. 
   They had been uprooted and forced to live in a cramped adversity with communal latrines and showers without stalls. Personal space and privacy taken from them.

    They worked, digging irrigation canals, raising fruit, vegetables and livestock. They made clothing and furniture, camouflage netting and rubber products for the military. They were paid between $12 and $19 a month. With their limited funds they published a newspaper, operated a general store, bank and barbershop. 

   Without due process, the Federal government gave Japanese Americans only days to decide what to do with homes, farms, businesses, cars and all property. Most sold their possessions at a significant loss. They took only what they could carry.

      Not one Japanese American was ever charged with espionage. 
    Nearly 26 thousand Japanese Americans served in the US Military during WWII, many serving with distinction and  decoration.  
    In the frame below is Teru Arikawa the mother of PFC Frank Arikawa, the first soldier from Manzanar who was killed in the line of duty.

        Most of the Japanese American soldiers served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in North Africa, France and Italy. The unit had the highest casualty rate and was the most highly decorated Army unit of its size and length of service.
    The quote below is from President Harry Truman at a White House ceremony honoring the 442nd and 100th Infantry Battalion of the Hawaiian Territorial Guard.

         President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 on February 19,1942 authorized relocation and/or internment of "anyone who might threaten the US war effort."  
       With that simple order American civil liberties and justice were savaged.  
        Processing and reporting centers were opened and Japanese Americans were forced to depart.

     Ten relocation camps were built. Without the rights due them, American citizens were forced into internment, with no idea of how long they would be held. No charges were brought against them.

    21st century Americans can visit Manzanar and see the vestige of a time when emotion, paranoia, awful political judgment and prejudice combined to create a despicable shadow on the life of this nation. It was a time that revealed our promise of freedom, liberty, and justice to be hollow and hypocritical. 

    It is both moving and frightening to see the names of those American citizens, who, because of heritage, were, without any legal recourse, treated like criminals and put into internment camps. Their freedoms were denied by an executive order, as a nation stood by.

    A driving and walking tour also covers the memorial ground, where those who died are remembered and where ashes were spread. 

 

       

     Post Trump America holds new paranoias and hatreds with new generations who are the target of zealots, racists, ideologues and politicians seeking favor.  

     

     I asked once if Manzanar could happen again? Could we again suspend due process and trample civil liberties because of fear and a perceived threat? With the Trump-McConnell appointees on the federal bench, and all the believers of the big lie, it's a valid question still.

                    

      Manzanar can be explained, but not excused, by the fear stemming from war. Now it is another affliction that stalks us. Ignorance, brutality, political expediency and radicalized hate have aggregated to threaten our way of life, our beliefs and our future.

     

       We have soul searching and soul work to do.

       See you down the trail. 

IMMORTALITY and THE GREAT CRUSADE

FROM JUNE TO HISTORY

    Time records extraordinary courage and human insight on two June 6ths.  

     Most recently, 70 years ago General Dwight Eisenhower called it "the Great Crusade," the D-Day invasion immortalized by the bravery of warriors, so many of whom ended their own mortal journey on the beaches of Northern France. A personal D-Day beach reflection follows below.

    75 years before that a single man, venturing into the unknown pondered human existence and the infinite.

EVERY NERVE QUIVERS

    John Muir made his first visit to Yosemite in the summer of 1869. On June 6th he wrote-

                     "We are now in the mountains and they are

                       in us...making every nerve quiver."    

       It seems that it has always been such for Yosemite.
     In 1851 an ongoing battle between gold miners and the native inhabitants, American Indians, reached a point where the famous Mariposa Battalion was sent in. Probably from the moment the Battalion saw the place, word about its beauty began to spread.

          On June 30,1864 President Abraham Lincoln set aside a grove of sequoias in the valley.  That marked the creation of the first state park in the US. 
        Naturalist John Muir, who spent years exploring the wilderness, campaigned for federal park status. It took 26 years and in 1890 Yosemite became a national park.

   Later on June 6, 1869 Muir wrote-

         "Our flesh and bone tabernacle seems transparent

         as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an 

         inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees

         streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun-a part of 

         all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but

         immortal."

       Two rivers, the Merced and the Tuolumne flow through the park. There are 196 miles of road and 800 miles of trails. 

        The waterfalls are a signature, always spectacular, and even more so after a winter with lots of snow.

 Do you see the sprite or spirit dancing out of this falls in this frame?

      The land is described as "colossal."  Indeed it is.  It ranges from 2,000 feet to 13,000 and most of it is true wilderness.

    As Muir said on his first summer in Yosemite "How wonderful the power of its beauty."

    WHERE FICTION CARRIES TRUTH

    A scene from my novel The Sanibel Arcanum has the protagonist, Tim Calvin visit Utah Beach, a D-Day invasion sight with Stroutsel a Jewish survivor who had been part of the French underground resistance.

  The beach was windswept, large and angry.  The gray sky hung low over the rough choppy water, and the surf pounded the beach with an intensity that bordered on animosity. Old enforcements and battle walls, pill boxes and even strands of barbed wire were visible, while cattle grazed over the dunes in fields where one of the decisive engagements of mankind's warfare had been played out in blood.

    "You can sense the terrible loss just standing here," Tim said more to the wind than Stroutsel, whose face was turned toward the beach.  "Doesn't this bring back the anger, the hatred?"

     Stroutsel cut the misty wind of the beach with his gravel-like voice.  "Do not be eager in your heart to be angry, for anger resides in the bosom of fools. That's from Solomon in Ecclesiastes, Calvin, it would do well for all of us to remember it."

     They stood, wrapped in silence and reflection as in a place of prayer as sand, wind and salt spray assaulted them.  Stroutsel faced squarely into the wind."Baruch, atah- Adonai-Blessed are though, O Lord, my rock who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.  My loving kindness and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and He in whom I take refuge.

      Tim stood transfixed by the moment and the sweeping emotions which girded them against the ghosts of this killing beach.

      "We are a mere breath, our days are like passing shadows," Stroutsel's voice faded as he walked north his eyes cast on the sand and looking out to the sea.  Tim let him go.  He walked to the memorials and read the names of those young men who had fallen on this strip of sand and sea."

    On Utah Beach alone some 2,500 US troops and 1,900 allied troops were killed. Thousands of others were killed on the other landing beaches as well as glider pilots and Naval support troops.  The Germans lost between 4 and 9 thousand  on D-Day.

    There is an almost palpable presence that remains on those Norman beaches.

    See you down the trail.