When I was a little boy, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. It was a surprise attack, and thousands of U.S. servicemembers perished. As a nation, we were stunned. And we vowed to strike back. Revenge was understandably on everyone’s mind, including many Americans of Japanese descent who opposed the emperor and were peaceful and law-abiding U.S. citizens and residents.
In its zeal to exact that revenge, however, the U.S. government overreacted, out of fear and bigotry. They targeted everyone who happened to look like the people who had carried out the attack. Those of us who had done nothing wrong were forced to pay the consequences for the decisions of others far away and disconnected from us. We were interned for years, in open-air prisons, while America went off to fight Japan, Germany and Italy.
It’s so important that we carry the lessons of the past through to today. Merely because one group commits atrocities and acts with depravity does not mean vast hundreds of thousands or even millions of others should be lumped together with them and made to suffer. We must never paint with the brush of justice and retaliation too broadly, or the toll of human suffering will rise immeasurably.
Liza Minnelli has outlived the the 𝕏 sign on top of the headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter. The sign only lasted three days before being taken down due to complaints.
Hey remember when newspapers would depict Jews with horns and a tail and we all agreed afterwards that that was a really, really bad thing to do?
Can we, uh, be a bit more pro-active about it this time?
90 years ago this month, Nazis burned books.
The books they first burned were the books from the Institute of Sexology, decades of research in transgender medicine and health.
History doesn't always repeat, but it certainly rhymes.