Les Miserables
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes.
Combeferre:
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!
George Takei: They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims
Special to The Washington Post
First Published Nov 18 2016 02:30PM
There is
dangerous talk these days by those who have the ear of some at the highest
levels of government. Earlier this week, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Trump
surrogate and co-chair of Great America PAC, gave an interview with Megyn Kelly
of Fox News. They were discussing the notion of a national Muslim registry, a
controversial part of the Trump administration's national security plans, when
Higbie dropped a bombshell: "We did it during World War II with Japanese,
which, you know, call it what you will," he said.
Was he really
citing the Japanese American internment, Kelly wanted to know, as grounds for
treating Muslims the same way today? Higbie responded that he wasn't saying we
should return to putting people in camps. But then he added, "There is
precedent for it."
Stop and
consider these words. The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in
which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our
livelihoods, and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who
bombed Pearl Harbor. Higbie speaks of the internment in the abstract, as a
"precedent" or a policy, ignoring the true human tragedy that
occurred.
I was just a
child of 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live
in a horse stable at a local race track, a family of five crammed into a single
smelly stall. It was a devastating blow to my parents, who had worked so hard
to buy a house and raise a family in Los Angeles. After several weeks, they
sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of
our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said.
We disembarked
in the fetid swamps of Arkansas at the Rohwer Relocation Center. Really, it was
a prison: Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns
pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We
were not to leave.
My parents did
their best to make life seem normal. As a child, I very readily accepted our
new circumstance and adjusted to it. As far as I was concerned, it was normal
to line up to use the common latrine, or to eat wretched grub in a common mess
hall, prisoners in our own country. It was normal for us to share a single
small barrack with no privacy whatsoever. And it was normal to stand each day
in our makeshift classroom, reciting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance,
"With liberty and justice for all," as I looked past the U.S. flag
out the window, the barbed wire of the camp just visible behind it.
Not until I was
older did I understand the irony of those words and the injustice that had been
visited on so many of us. As I studied civics and government in school, I came
to see the internment as an assault not only upon an entire group of Americans,
but upon the Constitution itself - how its guarantees of due process and equal
protection had been decimated by forces of fear and prejudice unleashed by
unscrupulous politicians. It had been a Democratic administration at the time,
under Franklin D. Roosevelt, that had ordered us to the camps, proving that
demagoguery and race-baiting knows no party.
It took decades
for the United States to own up to what it had done and officially apologize
for the internment, offering symbolic monetary reparations to the survivors. I
donated my own check to the Japanese American National Museum, whose mission,
like mine, has been to help ensure the mistakes of the past are never repeated.
That is why these words by Higbie, which ominously are representative of much
of the current thinking in the incoming administration, have reopened very old
and very deep wounds.
This was not
the first time the Trump camp had raised the internment. When he did so before,
it wasn't as the historical warning it should be, but as a precedent for what
might yet come. In late 2015, during the presidential primary, Trump actually
went on the record with Time magazine stating that he did not know whether he
would have supported or opposed the internment.
"I would
have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper
answer," he said. He argued that FDR was "one of the most highly
respected presidents," and that what he was suggesting was "no different
from FDR." Trump hedged his response with a nod to the horror of the
camps, but tellingly did not disavow them: "I certainly hate the concept
of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper
answer."
Higbie
similarly has kept open the specter of the camps, in one breath stating that
the does not favor the idea, but in the very next noting, "We have to
protect America first." Indeed, in a follow-up interview with the New York
Times, Higbie doubled down on the unthinkable: "There is historical,
factual precedent to do things [that] are not politically popular and sometimes
not right, in the interest of national security."
Let us all be
clear: "National security" must never again be permitted to justify
wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and
our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our
own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than
our enemies.
Let us also
agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for
greater security. During World War II, the government argued that military
authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful,
patriotic Japanese Americans. It concluded, therefore, that all those of
Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and
held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The very
same arguments echo today, on the assumption that a handful of presumed radical
elements within the Muslim community necessitates draconian measures against
the whole, all in the name of national security.
It begins with
profiling and with registries, but as Trump and Higbie have made clear, once
the safety of the country is at stake, all safeguards are off. In their world,
national security justifies actions that are "sometimes not right,"
and no one really can guarantee where it will end.
We cannot
permit this invidious thinking, discredited by history at the cost of so much
misery and suffering by innocents, to take root once again in America, let
alone in the White House. The stigmatization, separation and labeling of our
fellow humans based on race or religion has never led to a more secure world.
But it has too often led to one where the most vulnerable pay the highest
price.
The
Constitution and the government exist in large measure to protect against the
excesses of democracies. This is particularly salient when, in an atmosphere of
fear or mistrust, one group is singled out and vilified, as Japanese Americans
were during World War II and as Muslim Americans are today. How terrible it is
to contemplate, once again, that the government itself might once more be the
very instrument of terror and division. That cannot happen again. We cannot
allow it.
George Takei is an actor,
activist and social media maven.
Letter: I gave Trump a chance
By Kim Murphy Horiuchi
For the Deseret News
Published: Nov. 20, 2016
Since the election, a number of friends
have instructed me to “give Trump a chance” and dismissed my concerns as
“fearmongering.” But I already have given Trump multiple chances. Like the rest
of the electorate, I’ve been listening and watching for the past 18 months
since he declared his candidacy in June 2015.
I do not share
any of Donald Trump’s values and condemn his comments about women, minorities,
immigrants and the disabled, as well as the instigation of violence at his
rallies. I am troubled by the claims of fraud against his businesses (Trump U,
etc.), the allegations of abuse against women, his failure to pay contractors,
his bankruptcies and his write-off of almost $1 billion that likely allowed him
to avoid paying taxes for 18 years. The endorsements of Trump by the KKK and
other alt-right groups also are alarming, as is his recent appointment of Steve
Bannon as his chief strategist, whose blog has promoted white nationalism. His
comments about veterans and verbal attacks against a Gold Star family and John
McCain as a POW sicken me. These are facts, not “fearmongering.”
The people who
are protesting have reason to be afraid, and I would hope that my fellow Utahns
would have more compassion. A lot of people, including myself, are feeling
abandoned by those who preferred a misogynistic and vengeful demagogue for
president. We thought our friends and neighbors, people we thought we knew,
would stand against Trump’s charged and abusive rhetoric and that reason and
human decency would prevail. We are questioning if the country we love is
really the same place we thought it was — a place of liberty and justice for
all.
The
following somewhat tongue-in-cheek opinion with a serious suggestion: that the question about affiliation with
apostate groups be dropped from the recommend interview.
I am sure
Mason's piece will elicit a bevy of criticism from Republican Mormons who are
much more accustomed to asking the question of Democrats than answering
it. "Baby-killer" is the most
often used epithet LDS Republicans hurl at their Democratic brothers and
sisters. Or a feigned surprise
Republican Mormons show when they see one of their Democratic co-religionists
in the temple. I was once asked in a
temple recommend interview if, aside from the Democratic I affiliated with any
other apostate groups. ("just
[half] kidding, heh, heh"). Never
mind that I was high priest group leader at the time.
As M. J. Ogden
points out in a letter to the Standard Examiner November 21, 2016, Mormons did
not always march in lock step on political matters. They voted four times for FDR over the
explicit endorsement of his opponents by then President Heber J. Grant.
I suspect the
current change in following Republican church leaders began in 1960 when David
O. McKay inadvertently let slip his preference for Richard Nixon. Desmond Anderson, then a USC professor of public
administration, did a study on this. I
was asked to do questionnaires for it, and I thought it was later published,
but cannot find a reference to it. Nixon
carried Utah that year by about 10%
Relating
church leadership to the Republican Party was further strengthened in a quote by Ezra Taft
Benson. In February of 1974, he was asked
if a liberal Democrat could be a good Mormon, to which he responded: ‘'I think it would be very hard if he was living
the gospel and understood it.’ Benson's defenders (including many
Democrats) like to point out that after he became church president, he eschewed
political statements. While this is true, his actions behind the
scene were often partisan.
Since then the
Salt Lake Tribune has published the party affiliation of the top 15
members of the church hierarchy. They are majority Republican with a minority
being unaffiliated and not a single registered Democrat.
Thus the church's
bi-annual repetition of its political neutrality and support for a two party
system is greeted by a vast majority of its practicing American members with a
wink-wink, nod-nod reception as they go about their way of being the most reliable
group of Republican voters in the country.
Regarding Mason's
recommendation that question 6 about sympathy with apostate group, I'm old
enough to remember the background for this question. It goes back to the
apostasy of French missionaries in 1958 an d the resurgence of the Church of
the Firstborn. Unfortunately, it has morphed in the minds of many Mormon and
some Mormon leaders to mean any disagreement with the church over almost any
issue.
Op-ed: Should Mormons who voted for
Trump get temple recommends?
By David Mason
Mormons who
want to get into LDS temples must have a card, a "temple recommend"
that certifies not only that they live a certain, institutionally prescribed
orthopraxy, but also that they have verbally assented to a number of
ideological-theological propositions.
Among the
questions that LDS authorities will ask those who aspire to participate in
Mormonism's temple worship is Question 6: Do you affiliate with any group or
individual whose teachings or practices are contrary to or oppose those
accepted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or do you
sympathize with the precepts of any such group or individual?
Question 6 is
one of the more perfunctory questions of the temple interview process. The
strict and literal application of this question would exclude pretty much
everyone. So, these interviews largely dance across this question, often
acknowledging its pointlessness with chuckles.
Nevertheless,
the premise of this question serves, sometimes, as the rationale by which LDS
leaders exclude individuals from temple worship. LDS authorities can, and have,
used Question 6 to identify ideas they don't like as contrary to what the
church accepts and, then, to justify the exclusion of Mormons who find the
ideas compelling.
The
institution, it is often said, has a perfect right to regulate its affairs in
this way. I probably wouldn't dispute that the LDS Church's agents can exclude
people from its temples on the basis of behavior and belief, as, after all, the
church owns and operates the temple buildings in question.
But I would
point out that the application of Question 6 to exclude members from the temple
shows that the LDS Church has become a sectarian institution. A certain
Mormonism, among many possible Mormonisms, has secured a privileged place in
the LDS Church and protects and projects itself as the only genuine Mormonism
by marginalizing and excluding all alternatives. The use of Question 6 to
stigmatize Mormons who support the ordination of women, for instance, is an
index of the sectarian power that has seized control of Mormondom.
Consider the
recent presidential election. A perfectly reasonable reading of Question 6
would justify revoking the temple recommends of all recommend holders who voted
for 2016's GOP candidate, who, after all:
• Boasts,
openly, of sexually assaulting women, as a part of normal, daily interaction.
• Cheated,
rather shamelessly, on each of his three wives.
• Defrauded
thousands of people with a fake "university."
• Has
habitually refused to pay what he contractually owes.
• Lies with
frequency, regularity and, apparently, as a matter of strategic policy.
• Has publicly
ridiculed disabled people.
• Has advocated
violence against opponents.
• Has incited
violence against people of color.
I can see no
reason why Mormondom should not read a vote for such a man as a willful
affiliation with an individual whose teachings or practices are contrary to or
oppose those accepted by the church. I can see no reason that it should not
read a vote for such a man as sympathizing with the precepts of such a man.
What I write
here is not another lamentation over a lost election. My purpose here is to
draw attention to the identity of Mormonism. The fact that my proposal that
Trump-voting Mormons lose their temple recommends will be laughed off as
ridiculous — or probably vilified as another reason that I should lose my
temple recommend — reveals just how narrowly sectarian Mormonism has become.
I hold no
illusions that the LDS Church will revoke the temple recommends of
Trump-voters, though I genuinely think the gospel and tradition warrant such
action.
But with some
hope, I would suggest that the LDS Church scratch Question 6 from the recommend
interview and abandon, formally, officially and finally, the custom of holding
disciplinary councils on the basis of disagreements over theological or
ideological ideas.
And it won't do
to say that such councils form not to resist contrary ideas but only to resist
advocacy of contrary ideas. Contrary is in the eye of the beholder, and in the
church the power to act on what a person sees is grossly imbalanced in favor of
a particular sect. The refusal to acknowledge that a Trump vote advocates
sexual assault and racism makes clear that the way in which disciplinary action
is meted out in the church serves only to sustain a conspicuously sectarian
claim on the church.
David Mason is chair of
theatre and director of Asian studies at Rhodes College in Memphis and the
editor-in-chief of Ecumenica. He is the author of "Brigham Young:
Sovereign in America," "My Mormonism" and "Theatre and
Religion on Krishna's Stage."
Dan Rather - Now is a time when none of
us can afford to remain seated or silent. We must all stand up to be counted.
History will
demand to know which side were you on. This is not a question of politics or
party or even policy. This is a question about the very fundamentals of our
beautiful experiment in a pluralistic democracy ruled by law.
When I see
neo-Nazis raise their hands in terrifying solute, in public, in our nation's
capital, I shudder in horror. When I see that action mildly rebuked by a
boilerplate statement from the President-elect whom these bigots have praised,
the anger in me grows. And when I see some in a pliant press turn that mild
statement into what they call a denunciation I cannot hold back any longer.
Our Declaration
of Independence bequeaths us our cherished foundational principle: "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
These truths
may be self-evident but they are not self-replicating. Each generation has to
renew these vows. This nation was founded as an opposite pole to the
capriciousness of an authoritarian monarch. We set up institutions like a free
press and an independent court system to protect our fragile rights. We have
survived through bloody spasms of a Civil War and a Civil Rights Movement to
extend more of these rights to more of our citizens. But the direction of our
ship of state has not always been one of progress. We interned Japanese
Americans, Red Baited during the McCarthy era, and more. I feel the rip tide of
regression once again swelling under my feet. But I intend to remain standing.
In normal times
of a transition in our presidency between an incoming and outgoing
administration of differing political parties, there is a certain amount of
fretting on one side and gloating on the other. And the press usually takes a
stance that the new administration at least deserves to have a chance to get
started - a honeymoon period. But these are not normal times. This is not about
tax policy, health care, or education - even though all those and more are so
important. This is about racism, bigotry, intimidation and the specter of
corruption.
But as I stand
I do not despair, because I believe the vast majority of Americans stand with
me. To all those in Congress of both political parties, to all those in the
press, to religious and civic leaders around the country. your voices must be
heard. I hope that the President-elect can learn to rise above this and see the
dangers that are brewing. If he does and speaks forcibly, and with action, we
should be ready to welcome his voice. But of course I am deeply worried that
his selections of advisors and cabinet posts suggests otherwise.
To all of you I
say, stay vigilant. The great Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that even as a
minority, there was strength in numbers in fighting tyranny. Holding hands and
marching forward, raising your voice above the din of complacency, can move
mountains. And in this case, I believe there is a vast majority who wants to
see this nation continue in tolerance and freedom. But it will require
speaking. Engage in your civic government. Flood newsrooms or TV networks with
your calls if you feel they are slipping into the normalization of extremism.
Donate your time and money to causes that will fight to protect our liberties.
We are a great
nation. We have survived deep challenges in our past. We can and will do so
again. But we cannot be afraid to speak and act to ensure the future we want
for our children and grandchildren.
Carrie Ann
Sandt - I'm a single mom and my oldest son has autism. I have been so scared
for Kenny's future. I am terrified that Medicaid and Social Security are going
to have major cuts that will effect his future. Kenny just turned 18 and will
depend on these services for the rest of his life.
Since the
election we have noticed that people have a new sense of freedom in the awful
things that they are saying. Kenny works at a local grocery store as a bagger
with a job coach. A shopper last week said to him "I didn't know they
hired retards at this store". This was devastating. People feel like they
have gotten the green light to talk to people like this. People with
disabilities can't defend themselves. They are the most vulnerable among us.
The saddest part is that I had to explain to my son why someone would say something
like that to him. I have always told him that he was special and that autism
was a gift.
Kenny voted for
the first time and voted for Hillary all on his own. He sobbed the next day. I
didn't know what to say. He is very logical and this isn't logical.
See why I'm still concerned?
