Twice in two days the theme of Bystander Effect has been pushed into my consciousness. Another drug-deal gone-bad shooting went down in Uptown Chicago. I was headed into that area just minutes after the police arrived and the first stories were pushed to our screens.
The sirens flashed, warning people away from the area after the tragedy took place. In addition to leaving a man to bleed out onto the floor of a Starbucks, the masked shooter added to the chaos by shooting a bullet into an innocent 12 year old boy and another coffee shop customer.
This violence did not take place in a back alley or abandoned warehouse. It happened in a popular Starbucks on a pedestrian-laden street where people milled around on the sidewalk just outside. Like every other Starbucks, it is an all-glass tank that allows anyone to walk by or in this case to stand and stare in shock at the violence that took place. I’m sure it happened fast, and possibly only the gangster was armed. At least people flagged down a car and got the child rushed to the hospital nearby. Still…
I wonder about all the people who saw it happen and who stepped back to allow the killer to disappear into the night.
This is just one incident of many that happen (and will continue to happen) in the streets of Chicago and elsewhere. How many more lives will be lost as evil runs freely while the rest wait and watch for someone else to do something about it.
Who will speak up? Who will be more than a bystander waiting for someone else to take action?
Today I spent the day at the Alphawood Gallery walking through a part of history that belongs to me as much as to all Americans, those of Japanese heritage or otherwise. The shameful stain of the imprisonment of our Japanese immigrant Issei residents and Japanese-American citizens is glossed over in history class.
We (the U.S.) want to remember ourselves as the hero during WWII and so that is how we teach it to our children and future generations. We are the shining golden saviors that swooped in on the evil Nazis and liberated concentration camps overseas. I will not negate the heroics that took place. However, what often is not a focus of history books are those caught in the middle.
The ordinary citizens that suffer, that are shoved over one side of the line and smacked with a label to dehumanize and make them easier to hate or to forget.
This exhibit exposed the hidden truth that was lived by ordinary citizens (and residents of the U.S. who did not qualify to apply for citizenship because of their heritage.) Most of the images were focused on the victims — innocent children, parents just trying to make a living and take care of their families, elderly-even blind and handicapped.
Tiny babies that had been placed with warm, nurturing adoptive families were ripped from their homes and orphaned all over again, forced to live instead in drafty horse stables that still smelled of manure, with straw-stuffed mattresses and rodents. The locations of the Internment prisons were far from hospitals and adequate healthcare. So much frustration fills me when I read and heard these stories.
There was one image in particular that stood out. An image of the townspeople standing on the sidewalk watching, some even laughing or sneering. They lined the curb as if waiting for a parade. As we look at this moment in time, we saw what the Japanese and Japanese-Americans saw as they were carted away, defined as an “alien threat” (without due process or any actual charges).
By trucks and by train, with only one designated suitcase per person, they were sent to a barren destination unfit for human occupancy for an unknown sentence.
We have the timelines, the government declarations, dates of executive orders that ignored the rights of citizens based upon racial classification and hatred spread by propaganda. There were a few groups that attempted to right the injustice. The Quakers took a stance and took action. A few of the Japanese-American prisoners took legal action while incarcerated. When the U.S. supreme court was just one day away from declaring the actions unjust and illegal to the public, the mandate was reversed by the presidential administration and tucked away quietly.
How were so many others — the majority of the country, and those with the power and resources to right a wrong-ok to stand by and watch as neighbors, friends, small business owners, farmers, families, children-were uprooted and packed away shamefully like criminals to out-of-sight, out-of-mind prisons hedged in by barbed wire and guard towers?
Many of the survivors of this experience quietly served their unjust time as their part of the war effort. They did not make a fuss or talk about it even to their families. When the “internment camp” prisons closed, they were told to assimilate, and were strictly directed not to congregate. Anyone of Japanese ancestry was pushed away from the west coast and not allowed to return to their previous homes, lives and farmlands.
Seventy five years later…the few surviving U.S. citizen child-prisoners speak bravely, sharing their stories to help us (hopefully) learn from mistakes made in the past.
