do we learn?

I wrote this piece a few weeks ago when I was in Idaho:

Pat Tagasugi died this week.

Of course few reading this knows who Pat was. He was a farmer (around here if you are a “rancher” you are a cattleman). Pat’s farm was a thousand acres or so of Onions, mainly. He worked as director of the Agriculture department in the state government under 3 governors. Later he was elected to the state house of representatives. I never met Pat, though I read of him often. This last session of the legislature a woman I do know stood in for him while he went through treatment for the cancer that would finally take his life.

Last night there was a TV program about the Japanese internment at the beginning of the Pacific part of World War II. Pat was Japanese and would have been a little young for that internment, but his family wasn’t. At the beginning of World War II we were so frightened we rounded up all the Japanese -Americans and put them into “internment camps.” They were actually jails, remote and in isolated horrible locations.

There were a lot of fine Japanese farmers around southern Idaho where I grew up. They were some of the best. But they were rounded up.

But the piece on TV went on to compare the hysteria about the Japanese with the more recent bewilderment after 9-11 attack.

None of us are as wise as we wish we were, but in retrospect I think most agree that the internment of Japanese Americans was a horrible mistake. No one locked up Germans or Italians, just those who did not look like us.

Hind sight is so wonderful, but we learn from our past or we do not, and I am not sure we are doing well on this one.