Mother's Day, Part I

Today in church we heard from a member of our congregation, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, who published a memoir about her experience as a teenaged Japanese American incarcerated by the United States government in an internment camp during World War II. Today she told us her story. About how her family burned their books, letters, photos, and anything connected to Japan once the FBI started searching Japanese homes and taking away community leaders. About getting one week's notice that they would have to pack up their lives and be prepared to go away - to an unknown place, with an unknown climate, for an unknown period of time. She talked about life in an intern camp at the age of 16, wondering every day if she and her family were going to be taken away and shot. About having absolutely no sense of a future.

I never learned anything about the internments growing up in the Midwest, but you learn quickly about that sad history here on the West coast - an immediate legacy that affected your neighbor, your co-worker, your friends. The incarceration of 120,000 people - men, women and children, citizen and non-citizen alike - teaches an important lesson about the erosion of civil liberties, and the importance of dissent.