Why are we consistently so ready to throw away the rights of others to make us feel more comfortable? Today is Pearl Harbor day. In response to what was a legitimate and horrific tragedy, one of the responses of the United States was to round up everyone we could find who was Japanese or of Japanese heritage and throw them into internment camps. To make the rest of America feel safer, we decided to take an entire segment of the US population and lock them away. We withdrew the rights of some to protect the rights of others.
Though this had been widely recognized as a tragedy of its own, a human rights sneak attack, we were all too ready as a country to repeat it after 9/11 by creating Guantanamo. Though many recognize it for what it is today, how sad of a chapter it will be in history to see that we keep repeating this mistake.
Unfortunately, our voracious appetite for stripping the rights of those we perceive of as enemies is not confined to those of other nationalities, other skin tones or other countries. California showed the spirit is alive and well when Proposition 8 recently passed. The voters demonstrated their willingness to strip a right that they themselves enjoy just because they disagreed with or felt wronged by those who held it.
When will we recognize that any effort we make to take away the rights of others, regardless of how justified we feel in the effort, reduces us all and will be proven by history to to be the tragedy it is?
Technorati Tags: pearl harbor, japanese internment, world war 2, rights, japanese americans, civil rights
