“Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it” -Edmund Burke
I came of age during the Vietnam War. Fourteen years of carnage, 55,000 Americans lost, massive protests in the streets, hundreds of millions wasted, utter defeat. I remember thinking to myself, at least we will never be that stupid again. Thirty years later we invaded Iraq and the nightmare continues with no hope of resolution in sight.
My first boss after graduating law school, as a Public Defender, spent four years of her childhood in a Japanese “internment camp”. She was staunch supporter of civil rights, who’s foundation was steeped in the reality that at any age, an entire demographic of Americans could be rounded up, their property seized, and they imprisoned, simply because they were members of a racial group that was identified as our “enemy”. As she, Joyce Yoshioka, told me what her family had endured, the staggering injustice of it all made me angry. I consoled myself by thinking we will never do that again. I naively believed we would never go back to a time when institutional racism was acceptable to the American people.
Enter Donald Trump. I have lived long enough to see dark chapters of our history repeat itself.
Specifically identifying people from an identifiable religion or racial group in order to discriminate against them is racism. It has become acceptable to a large portion of our nations populace to identify Americans of Middle Eastern heritage as potential enemies, and thus discriminate against them all.
Fear, anger, and eventual hatred are our rationales for racism. It is what they want from us, the end game strategy that terrorism is all about. Make us hate all of “them” as much as they hate us. Hate breed’s hate, evil leads to more evil, and the beacon of light in the world that once was the United States of America is extinguished. “Truth, justice and liberty for all”… if only we can hang onto that which truly made us great for a little while longer.