Late last summer, I was at my desk in my beloved old apartment – “processing snail mail”. I happened to have my checkbook, new address labels, etc. The Daughters of Hawai’i sent me a newsletter and a couple of raffle tickets. I usually just pitch the raffle tickets. Figure, I give the Daughters enough money. But, since I was going to send the Daughters a change of address – I wrote a check for the tickets, stuck address labels on them, and sent the tickets back along with my request to change my address. And promptly forgot about it.
Well, you can imagine how surprised I was when I got a phone call telling me I won a king size handmade quilt. It is set up for hanging – but it is HUGE and I am out of wall space at the Old Bat Cave. Guess it will just have to end up on the bed. And, my lawyer will have to add the quilt to her list of “stuff that shouldn’t just go to Goodwill” when I go.
But on to the outrage. I have been watching with great dismay all this anti-refugee talk. But, it reached a new level of outrage today when I am reading the Washington Post and found this article:
The small, southwestern Virginia city of Roanoke should refuse to help settle Syrian refugees in the U.S. just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans in America during World War II.
That’s the argument being made by Roanoke’s Democratic mayor, David Bowers. In a statement Wednesday, he said he was requesting that all government and non-government organizations in the city of 99,000 suspend any assistance to Syrian refugees “until these serious hostilities and atrocities end.”
As justification, he compared the situation to World War II.
“President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor,” he said, “and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”
The internment of Japanese, many US citizens, during WWII was a dark time in our history. When I went to school, we didn’t learn about the internment. I was a so called educated grownup when I realized that many of my “Japanese” friends here in Hawai’i were born in places like Arizona and California. I had to ask “why were you born in Arizona?” And, ever so carefully, with no obvious animosity, I was told about Manzanar, Amache, Heart Mountain etc…
Congratulations on the quilt.
It is sad what we do out of fear and how little we learn from the past.