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Tuesday, September 7, 2004
Protect internment class
We're not sure exactly what "context" some parents complain is missing from Bainbridge Island social studies teacher Marie Marrs' "Leaving our Island" program about the internment of Japanese island residents in the spring of 1942. What "context" justified the rounding up and incarceration of people -- many of them American citizens -- on the grounds of their race?
One parent also objects to the program examining a link between the internment and potential threats to civil liberties, such as the USA Patriot Act, in this era of terrorism fears. Such a comparison, the parent says, "rises to the level of propaganda."
Nonsense. It's perfectly appropriate and educationally sound to let the internment serve a prospective lesson in what can happen when understandable public fear allows an unjustifiable government response.
The dispute is ironic in that it arises at an intermediate school named after an internee (Sakai), on an island where another school is named after a local newspaperman (Woodward) who was the lone West Coast editorial voice opposing the internment.
Second-rate scholars and apologist journalists may practice cynical revisionism, but one Bainbridge student nailed the essential lesson: "We have to speak up when civil rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution are trampled in the name of national security."
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