Tough Act to Follow?

Boy, this is some incredible stuff.
I mean it's sort of mind blowing and if you've been following along at home, you know that my mind it pretty much blown so it takes something really big to blow it again.
If you know what I mean.
Well, in history class, U.S. History, the children are learning about Japanese World War II(WWII) internment.
Hopefully, most of you heard of Manzanar, probably the most famous of the interment camps and know a little about what happened.
If not, here's a brief synopsis:
During WWII, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, folks on the West Coast of the United States got their panties in a bunch worried about whether or not Japanese folks were loyal to America or the Japanese emperor. By now, 1941, there's about 150,000 Japanese living in Hawaii(not America yet) and about 120,000 living on the West Coast.
Now these Japanese folks in America, apparently they were some hard workers for by now their farms and stuff were pretty successful. Some of them were first generation Japanese, not allowed by law to become citizens, but about a third of them were born here in the good ole U.S.
Some folks in the government though, decided that they were a risk to like national security or something and decided to round them up and put them all in some camps in the middle of nowhere until they could sort out the loyal ones from the potential dangerous ones.
Beginning to sound familiar?
Now most of these folks, who were citizens by the way, were basically stripped of their constitutional and civil right and sent off to what I would call a prefabricated government ghetto.
How many folks?
Roughly about 120,000 or enough folks to create the third or fourth largest city in Arizona at the time.
Places like Poston, Tule Lake, Manzanar and Gila all had populations of over 10,000.
Pretty grim stuff.
It's also interesting to note that no large group of Germans or Italians were ever detained.
So anyways, I decided to do a little more research so I went to the school library and got a couple of books.
First I reread Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakastuki Houston and her husband James D. Houston. I remember this book from back in like middle school, but for some reason, I never read it.
Basically, it's a first hand account of an internment camp survivor and how all that stuff impacted her life.
It was interesting, but not really what I was looking for.
Then I went and got a book called Ethnicity and Confinement, by Jeffrey F. Burton et al, but it was more about recording the various internment camp sites and creating a historical record.
Interesting also, but no real info on why and how this all happened.
Then I came across Years of Infamy by Michi Weglyn:



Now this book pretty much has all the whos and whys covered.
As I said before, it's pretty mind blowing stuff.
Folks back then really had the bug for half of Oregon, Washington and all of California were declared some kind of special zone and if you were Japanese and you lived there well too bad for you.
Just pack up what you can carry and move along please!
I mean even if it's 1942 or so, it's still hard to believe all this went down.
I mean this is America and all!
Even the Supreme Court of the day decided it was all kosher because there was a war on and the President can pretty much do what he wants if there's a war on and maybe I wouldn't have job if the President didn't put me here.
If you know what I mean.
There was some seriously bad stuff going on back then.
Of course many years later, the Congress and those Washington D.C. folks figured out it was all a big mistake and passed some bill of apology and gave the folks still alive some money.
America is a young country and all and I guess we're going to make some mistakes. Most of the internment camp sites are historical monuments, dedicated so that folks remember what happened and don't do it again.
The thing is, as I was reading about this, and seriously, I couldn't believe what I was reading, certain aspects of it began to seem familiar, in a contemporary context.
Okay, I highly doubt the government is going to start rounding up folks and sticking them in the middle of the desert or something but it seems to me that the way we look at each other hasn't really changed much in the last oh, sixty years or so.
I mean things have gotten better, but I think there's still a lot of work to be done so that stuff like Executive Order 9066 don't happen again.
History does have a way of repeating itself don't you know.
That interment stuff though, that's a tough act to follow.