Sunday, March 4, 2012

I have been looking into history lately.

There are a few eras in history I am particularly fascinated with.  I am fascinated with WWII and the holocaust and the internment of the Japanese.  I think about the murder of millions of people and the fact that many people knew or had a good idea what was going on and did nothing, while others risked their lives and some just did whatever they could. In the United States we placed people of Japanese decent into internment camps.  We may not have been as brazen to kill them.  We just housed them in upscale prisoner of war camps even though many of them were not soldiers or prisoners of any kind.  That was in the forties. 

Fast forward two decades and there are now struggles for racial equality.  Some people risked their lives.  Some people wanted things to remain the same.  Some people did what they could to support change.  On HBO there is a documentary called The Loving Story.  In this documentary an interracial married couple in Virginia challenges the laws that make interracial marriage illegal.  They challenged the law in the supreme court of the United States and won.   Now people of any race can marry each other.  This whole fight was started by writing a letter. 

We in the United States seem to like our prejudices.  Racial, ethnic, disability and sexual orientation it does not seem to matter someone is always less than someone else in someones eyes.  For those of us that truly hate this, we do not know what to do.  If the prejudice does not affect our group we do nothing.  I hope anyone reading this remembers that doing nothing gets us nowhere.  We cannot believe in the rights of one group over another if we believe in equality.  We may not all may not risk our lives.  Some of us can speak, some of us can write, most of us can vote.  If we fight for equality we fight for everyone any way we can.  Take care

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