Not bombs and camps

Nearly 75 years ago this week, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing 2,403 U.S. soldiers and citizens. The ensuing war in the Pacific lasted four more years where 110,000 American soldiers would be killed along with more than 1.7 million Japanese.
Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001 are two dates in our country’s history that share the same mantle of “infamy” of sudden terror and nationwide shock, although separated by 60 years and multiple generations. Both dates are still remembered each year with solemn vigils, led by the first-line responders and survivors of the attacks.
The more recent shattering incident of mass killings in San Bernardino last week again set off a nationwide scream of fear and vulnerability, reverberating the early days’ radio broadcasts of 1941 and the live TV images of the falling World Trade Center towers of 9/11.
All these indelible dates of U.S. history have become permanent textbook lessons for school children. They are filled with sad ironies and puzzling outcomes.
The Pearl Harbor attack took place when the world was a simpler, almost primeval place. It was a more bloody time full of killing machines like tanks, chemical bombs and large munitions. Back then, nations declared war on other nations. The terror was sanctioned by governments, including ours.
We zeroed in on our sworn enemies, filling the skies over Europe with fighter planes and dropping atomic bombs on the island of Japan.
The 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists with no avowed nation-state allegiance. The two San Bernardino shooters that killed 14 people have been called “terrorist sympathizers,” whatever that label helps us understand. We want to again “zero” in on the enemy but we don’t know where we should drop our bombs this time. One shooter was a U.S.-born citizen and the other was here as a legal resident.
Which world would we prefer, the more simplistic one with a better-defined enemy but millions of deaths, or a very complicated time of isolated killings and undefined and almost-invisible enemies?
Of course, we would choose neither, except that we have lived in both with no sense that more Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attacks won’t happen again — or even soon.
After the Pearl Harbor attack 74 years ago, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese-Americans from coastal and western states into barbed-wire internment camps. All of Sonoma County’s first and second generation Japanese-Americans were sent to camps like the Amache Relocation Center in Granado, Colorado. Some of the younger men were drafted into the U.S. Army to fight against Nazi Germany in Europe. Many died in battle for the country that held their families in prison-like isolation. (It took the U.S. government 50 years to admit the internments were wrong and offered $20,000 redress payments to camp survivors.)
Now, with a less clear picture of who is the enemy, there is a palpable public sentiment to reopen internment camps for Muslim-Americans, Syrian refugees and, we guess, “terrorist-sympathizers.”
As a nation — and as a world of nations — we have not learned how to eliminate or constrain enemy or extremist forces. We have declared wars in many wrong places, for many wrong reasons.
We are not confused that radical jihadists like the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda and the dead Osama bin Laden are all sworn enemies of the United States. But we are confused about why they first became our enemies — and about why billions of Muslims are not our enemy.
We live in a world where the Japanese people and government are now our friends, and so are all Germans, Vietnamese and other past war foes.
As important as it is to always remember Pearl Harbor, we should more importantly remember the supreme price that millions paid for our subsequent decades of peace in the Pacific, Asia and across almost all continents.
What will it take to bring the same peace to the Middle East? Is there a more humanitarian solution than internment camps, atomic bombs and hate-fueled rage?
— Rollie Atkinson