MEMORIAL DAY -- THEN and NOW

MEMORIAL CEMETERY, ANZIO, ITALY

Weird!  I sit here listening to Mariachi music from Mexico and writing about Memorial Day 25 miles north of the doorway to Latin America.  
This has been a very interesting Memorial Day for a Massachusetts guy.  At church this morning we sang America the Beautiful and it felt very strange doing that in California.  I don't know why.  It just felt so far away from my cultural roots.  Then I came back to the house and PBS was replaying the entire series of Ken Burns dedicated to World War II.  So I spent a lot of time in front of the tube.  I couldn't break away.  It was a roller coaster of emotions.  The parts of the Italian campaign really got to me.  I lived in Italy for four years and I feel as connected to that people as I do to you all.  It was not an easy segment for me.  The hardest part of it was when the historic fact featuring the Japanese Americans as heroes in the conquest of the Italian peninsula.  Oh No!  How cruel history can be.  No wonder politicians lie about it all the time,  
I remember my visit to Anzio.  I was about 25 years old.  I went through at least one handkerchief that day.  You are looking at a place where, there, under the grass, lay Italian Americans, Japanese Americans, French  Canadian Americans, Irish Americans, American Indians, African Americans and who knows how many more hyphenated Americans, including descendants from the Pilgrims.  I saw it all there in Anzio that day.  
Here's an interesting fact about that visit.  At that time, I did not even know the true story about the internment camps where the Japanese residents of the United States, many of them citizens, were imprisoned.  When I first heard it, I was at least 50.  I didn't believe it.  I actually went to the library to check it out.  I am still shaking my head in disbelief at it.  It has remained one of my favorite history stories.  What really gets me is the depth of the insult to the children of the prisoners.  Make them fight the battles of the very government that imprisoned them despite their perfect innocence.  And they went.  And they distiguished themselves with great valor in battle.  That certainly takes the shine off my FDR Half-dollar!

After the European war was in the bag, some of the Japanese Americans found themselves involved in Asia.  There is a museum of Japanese American History in San Jose, California.  Belle and I visited it one time, shortly after it's opening.  It is there that I saw one of the most moving pictures that I have ever laid eyes on.  It shows a Japanese American US soldier guarding some Japanese Nationals in a war camp.  They are talking and the Japanese American has his fingers through the chain-link fence, reaching for brotherly contact.  I have requested a copy for you all.
I know that I could go on for a few thousand words about war, but I will spare you.  I will only make a final comment about one of the thoughts that I have been carrying around for as few months now.
It is connected to governing and politics.  
It has to do with mercenaries who are hired to fight in wars.  It also has to do with the construction companies who carpet bag their way into the economics of war.  It also has to do with the vested interests that the politicians have with these war mongering interests.  I suppose that a defensive war could perhaps approach being almost moral.  But there is no doubt in my mind that even then the immorality of profiteering from war is never morally correct.  And this on many levels.  I will spare you the few hundred, [thousands?] words that I have about that.


To close let me just make a comment about that ran through my head when the part of the Bataan Death March came on during the Ken Burns documentary.  
I was quite old [late 50's] when I first learned of the death march of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma, Louisiana and other parts.  I, like most of us, knew, and know, of the senseless, racism fueled slaughter of the Plains Indians.  We rarely hear of the forced displacement of the peace-loving, agriculturally settled Cherokee Nation of Southeast North America.
Don't try denying it.  I have living friends who descend from the very people who suffered  it.  


It makes me wonder if we will ever learn.

FORT ROSECRANS, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA