October 2024 Flash Lit 3:2 - From Head to Toe

It made my whole body tingle, but not in a good way.  It was the crackle of anger and disgust and shame pulsing from head to toe, plus an aching in my chest and a stomach threatening to reject all contents.  And I wanted to cry.

Yes, it was an extreme reaction, but I don’t think it was disproportionate.  The provocation was a guard tower with a place for a searchlight and soldiers with guns at Manzanar.  Those guns were pointed inward.  At Americans.  At children, for God’s sake.  The only difference between the people held at Manzanar and me is that they were of Japanese ancestry.

 

I don’t know when I learned that my own country rounded up thousands of people and put them in makeshift concentration camps for years, but it was not before college.  I grew up somehow believing that Americans were the good guys now that we’d gotten rid of slavery.  We valued all people from all places, whatever color they were.  I wish that had turned out to be true.  We cis/straight/white people have a lot to answer for.

 

Seeing the history of Manzanar in front of me, the bones of the sheds people lived in, the toilets without partitions or privacy, the photos of families mourning their sons killed fighting for a country that questioned their loyalty, was powerful and horrible.  Seeing what the people confined to Manzanar managed to make out of their horrible conditions made me marvel at the resilience of people.

 

We Americans can choose.  We can choose to face and thereby begin to transform our racist history.  We can continue to try to sweep our mistakes under the rug.  Or, as more than I would like to admit want, we can embrace and expand that racism.

 

Vote, people.  Like our souls depend on it.