I normally try to not let politics mingle with my photography, mostly because I’m not that political of a person. However, last week’s shootings in California hit a little too close to home, and today I’m feeling the weight of it all.
Today, I’m thinking about this image, which I made back in 2010 in the cemetery at Manzanar National Historic Site. If you’ve spent any time in the eastern Sierra, you’ve surely driven by, maybe even stopped. Manzanar was one of the internment camps that the U.S. government established after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to house Japanese-American citizens. These internment camps were the result of the mass hysteria of not knowing who the enemy might be as the U.S. entered World War II.
Upon reflection, our view of Japanese-Americans was painted with the broad brushstrokes of fear–an entire ethnic group was characterized based on the actions of a government across the Pacific.
It’s been a rough month, with the Paris bombings, various attacks elsewhere, capped off by the largest mass shooting seen in the U.S. in two years. Of course no reasonable person wants to see these things happen, but at the same time, we struggle for someone to “blame”–perhaps knowing we can pin the blame on someone, or something, helps ease the sting a little bit, helps us make sense of it.
In making peace with these senseless deaths, history seems to be repeating itself, and many people are once again painting an entire religion with broad brushstrokes, based on the actions of a few. The growing hysteria and now-cyclical rhetoric is no doubt fueled by ongoing debates between presidential candidates, social media, and the conflation of this discussion with that of gun control.
I’ve only stopped at Manzanar once–it’s all I could handle. While the visitor center presents the role of internment camps in our history as best it can, there’s a certain melancholy that seems to have transcended the buildings and gardens, which are now gone. There’s the memory of good people being ripped from their homes and sent to places they didn’t want to go, simply because of their ethnicity. This was a low point in our country’s history; although it can’t be undone, it should be cause for serious self-reflection. The violence we face today is not a Muslim problem, a Christian problem, or an atheist problem. It’s a problem of angry people doing awful things. Stopping those awful things from happening is the topic of another blog post, which I’m not qualified to write. However, if we are to move forward as a country and search out solutions, we can’t do it divided, scared of one another, labeling one another–it simply won’t work.
Okay, now that that’s off my chest, the year is wrapping up and I’m thinking about my “best of” blog post. I’ve had a varied, but productive year, and look forward to sharing some of those images soon. Thanks for reading.
All very well said, Greg, and it’s always nice to know someone has a thoughtful reaction to such things. Manzanar has a lot to teach us. It’s tempting, when we think about that history, to say, “Well, if I had to be put in a camp in World War II, please sign me up for Manzanar.” But that’s a 20-20 hindsight sort of view. The people sent there didn’t know how the story was going to end, and neither did the people in charge. What might these camps have turned into if the war had dragged out even longer and gone badly, or if Japan had conducted another strike on our home ground? The people in Manzanar suffered an great injustice – thank God it stopped at that and didn’t turn from injustice into true horror. The lesson here for me, and I hope for everyone, is that we shouldn’t step on the bottom rung of a ladder if we wouldn’t want to climb to the top.
Thanks, Jackson! Yes, I think the uncertainty, and the fear of the unknown is what created a huge amount of fear on both sides of the issue. Not knowing–or more precisely–not understanding, is what causes a great many injustices, both big (like this) and small.
Very apt analogy about the ladder. Thanks again for your comment!
Thank you for writing this. I just tweeted an Onion article where historians warn people to look at things that happened previously before making new decisions. It’s so tragically hilarious. But maybe just tragic. I want to shake the nation and yell how utterly wrong it is to blame a whole group for a few bad apples, no matter how terrifying those few are. Someone close to me was born in Manzanar, so this whole post was poignant. Thank you.
-Derek
Long time reader
Thanks, Derek! I think that what makes anything funny is that there is some truth to it, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of tragic irony here. And of course the Onion always points out the irony so well.
Thanks for commenting and reading! I really appreciate it…
very excellent post I would like to copy to my blog
Thank you Myer, I appreciate you stopping by!
Greatly enjoyed reading this post. I’ve had similar reflections on just how little it takes our society to become hateful toward a “minority.” Manzanar was not very long ago.