When 'I Am an American' Didn't Count

Ronald Reagan was right. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for [and] protected …” His words came to mind recently when we traveled to Bainbridge Island, Washington. We came to Washington to tour the island through the eyes of a 96-year-old man who had grown up on the island and was a family friend.

It was an overcast and blustery day, and I was glad I’d remembered to bring a jacket. The small cadre of tourists was conveyed on a minibus. The tightly orchestrated tour didn’t take us to galleries or frilly places. Instead, we learned where the loggers logged, where the seafood processing plants used to be, where our guide ran as a child and courted his girlfriend, and the place where long-time Bainbridge Island families, business owners, grandmothers, and infants were taken to catch a ferry ride to begin their journey to prison.

The federal government started by arresting Japanese men – American citizens – “within hours” of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, signaling America’s entry into the war in the Pacific in World War II. President Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the West Coast as a military exclusion zone. “My father was arrested early after Pearl Harbor,” Lilly Kitamoto Kadama says in her oral history of the federal government’s purge of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese people. “There were many FBI agents, I knew they didn’t have a warrant,” she said.

“They were shop owners, language teachers, Buddhist priests, law-abiding citizens,” George Nakata said. The then nine-year-old would be rounded up after the men and sent to the prison camp. “They happened to be prominent in the community,” he says in his oral history. It’s believed that 34 men were arrested out of the 45 Japanese families on the Island.

Kadama says, “Our constitution is unique in that it doesn’t say ‘no citizen,’ it says ‘no person‘ shall be arrested without due process or warrant. None of that was done.”

And then the American government came for the families.

These families were given one week to get their affairs in order; figure out who would or could run their stores, their farms, or their households; pack what they could take on their backs; and ready themselves for what they were told was a six-month trip to an exclusion zone — a prison camp.  They were there for three-and-a-half years.

Men with fixed bayonet rifles forced these American citizens on ferry boats, which took them to camps in the California desert.

Their imprisonment was cheered by Americans, most media, and politicians.

That ferry terminal is now a historical site where our guide walked us through an exhibition of works depicting that time.

“I felt like a second-class citizen to be herded onto a boat by soldiers with bayonets,” Isami Nakao is quoted in one of the art pieces. “It was … the most humiliating experience of my life.”

One Japanese American woman said in her oral history that she believed the Bainbridge Island round-up – the first in the country – was the test case to determine if it could be easily replicated along the West Coast.

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The Japanese were caricatured. They were accused of carrying diseases and mocked for their clothes and their intellect.

As we toured through the exhibit, there were expressions of disbelief, head shaking, and “never again” said by the people. Others expressed embarrassment for our country. All appropriate responses, of course.

But as I moved through the exhibit I felt of course it could happen again. It basically did occur. I looked around and thought:  Where have you people been for the last three years? 

After all, at the height of the COVID hysteria, unmasked people were shouted out of stores by clerks and customers. Leftist scholars urged the unvaccinated to  have “the decency to remove themselves from the community” in exclusion zones where finding food would be “their problem.” This was cheered by fellow Leftists in the media. Leftists like Leana Wen of Georgetown University and CNN called for Chinese-like lockdowns in America, urging the unvaccinated to be locked up in their homes as punishment. Government employees were fired for their refusal to be shot up with experimental medicines. Navy SEALS were washed out. At least one doctor was publicly hauled out of his workplace and ordered to never return for not getting the experimental shot. His ouster and the censoring of other doctors for not agreeing with the government were cheered.

UCLA anesthesiologist Dr. Chris Rake, a COVID-19 vaccine mandate opponent, was escorted out of the UCLA medical plaza yesterday and placed on unpaid administrative leave for refusing to get vaccinated or request an exemption.

“I’m willing to go lose everything…even my life.” pic.twitter.com/7AxUX4uyeF

— Samuel Braslow (@SamBraslow) October 6, 2021

Lawmakers and COVID dictator Gavin Newsom passed and inked a bill to punish doctors for disagreeing with the government’s pronouncements on the virus in violation of the First Amendment.

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There were massive protests against COVID mandate tyranny around the world, and the protesters were accused of passing “misinformation” because they didn’t agree with the government.

COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and vaccine passports sparked massive protests by millions across the globe. Has there ever been a larger global movement opposing tyranny? pic.twitter.com/hlPcjUX1zs

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) July 3, 2023

Newsom’s Davos fellow traveler Justin Trudeau stripped truck drivers of their jobs, banking, licenses, and other necessary things to run a business. Truckers disagreed with his COVID mandates. Some protesters were imprisoned. And the New York Times cheered it on.

Newsom shut down or so heavily regulated church services that he instructed people not to sing. 

Government actors applauded politically Left mass demonstrations but shut down gatherings like churches with which they disagreed.

Germany locked down unvaccinated people.

And Washington state – yes, the same Washington state – purchased  hotels as camps for people testing positive for the virus and advertised for “Isolation and Quarantine Strike Team” consultants to watch over the locked-up people.

In 1944, the FDR Supreme Court affirmed the president’s executive order establishing a military exclusion zone and rounding up people and putting them in camps for national security.

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Toyosaburo Korematsu was arrested after he refused to go to an internment camp, but the Court ruled in Korematsu vs United States that the feds had the right to lock him up. That decision was overturned only in 2018 in a decision upholding President Trump’s decision to exclude people from terrorist countries from coming to the U.S.

In 1988, Reagan signed an apology letter and paid $20,000 to all Japanese locked up during World War II.

And his redolent words about freedom on this July 4 have never been truer.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

We should never forget how easily freedom slips away. It is up to responsible people, who fully understand what their rights are, to teach the next generation what real freedom is, that it’s worth fighting for and isn’t free.

And that you need a gun to ensure it.