When America was attacked on December 7, 1941, we had a clear enemy with whom to go to war, but we still reacted in ways that shamed us, interning Japanese Americans who were natural born citizens in camps in the remote desert. We didn’t even acknowledge that in our schools until 1968. I remember when it was first memtioned in CA textbooks. It was given a single short paragraph. When I moved back to the middle west in 1970 it still wasn’t mentioned in Ohio textbooks. It wasn’t until 1988 that Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation said that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”.
My dad was a child when that happened, just past 10 years old. He told me once that he first heard the news reports on the radio at his aunt and uncle’s store. They listened to President Roosevelt’s speech later on the same radio. Dad’s description made it clear that like the attack on the World Trade Center, it was not a thing anyone old enough to vaguely understand what had happened would ever forget.
Oddly enough, as shameful as that episode of American history was, I find hope in it. We recovered from that particular insanity. It was very clear who “The Enemy” was and where to find them after Pearl Harbor, and we took the war back to them. We also pinned the label of Enemy on anyone who had the remotest genetic connection, and suspended civil liberties in the name of “security”. To me it looks remarkably similar to our reaction to Al Qaida’s attack, though our response was far less well considered. But once again, we pinned the label of Enemy on anyone with a remote connection to the real enemy, this time based on religion as well as nationality. Certainly our attackers were genuinely evil men led by intelligent, ruthless, utterly evil fanatics. I’m even sure they have the quiet aquiescent backing of some of their countrymen, out of shared hatred or fear or simple indifference. That doesn’t make a third generation Arab American an automatic terrorist or sympathizer, any more than it automatically made the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Japanese immigrants spies for the Emperor.
As a nation, we didn’t recover from the fear engendered in 1941 until that “other” was no longer The Enemy, and we went from that pretty directly in the anti-Communist hysteria of McCarthyism. I don’t know what it will take this time. There is no single nation or alliance we can point to, which makes it that much harder to figure out when we are safe. Osama bin Laden is dead, as are many (possibly all) of his chief lieutenants. We’ve arguably been at war for all the ensuing ten years against the wrong enemies. We are, at the moment, ethically and financially near bankrupt. We have people in office who, like McCarthy and his House Committe on UnAmerican Activites, feed the fear and hatred to stay in power. But we did, eventually, remember what our Constitution said. We did, eventually, repudiate the purveyors of fear. We did, eventually, relearn that we were Americans first, regardless of where our ancestors came from or a few rotten apples in their baskets.
So yes, I remember where I was on that perfect clear Spetember morning. I was driving to work listening to NPR, when I heard the report that a plane had been flown into the first tower earlier that morning. They were describing it as a tragic accident. Then less than five minutes later the report came that the second tower had been hit, and my immediate thought was that someone was declaring war on the United States, and that we didn’t even know yet who or why. I watched in horror and in pride as the country and the world responded. Since then I have watched in grief and in shame and in dread as we have quietly surrendered our constitutional rights and as our alleged leaders continued to milk the events of that single day for political capital and personal profit. But we have been this way before. Today, ten years after, I hope we find our way back to the nation I grew up loving.