Saturday

Dad's surgery sounds like it went well.  It's snowing up north, hopefully he will be able to get home alright tomorrow.  All hell has broken out in Venezuela.  More info on Ukraine, and even if the country does split into an east and a west, I hope the opposition parties can agree on more than the desire to oust Yanukovych.  I pray for an end to bloodshed and for a time where all people feel heard; for a peaceful agreement for all concerned and that democracy is upheld.

I spent most of my day at a Day of Rememberance Commemoration for the signing of executive order 9066 (Feb. 19, 1942) ordering the forced removal, exclusion and incarceration of over 110,000 Japanese Americans during WWII.  This one honored the life and courage of Gordon Hirabayashi, who resisted the curfew, and the internment camps and was sentenced to prison 2x (correction from what I previously had written.)  Those convictions were vacated in 1987, and he died in January of 2012.  He later received the Presidential Medal of  Freedom in May of 2012.  He resisted both on moral grounds (his religeous beliefs, he was a Quaker, and a conscientious objector) and as quoted to Ronald Takaki, "As an American citizen, I wanted to uphold the principles of the Constitution, and the curfew and evacuation orders which singled out a group on the basis of ethnicity violated them.  It was not acceptable to be less than a full citizen in a white man's country."  He was a college senior when he chose to resist.

He turned himself in to the FBI, and after he was found guilty of failing to obey the curfew and the exclusion orders, he was sentenced to a federal prison in Tuscon, Arizona.  As there was no way to transport him there due to all money being directed to the war effort, he hitch-hiked to the prison.   He believed in this country and the Constitution and was willing to challenge laws that went against it.  All of his papers, letters, diaries, and the Medal of Freedom were donated to the University of Washington's Special Collections in the Pacific Northwest Collection.  I'm hoping to read some of them.  It's an inspiring thing to know what one believes in so fully and to base your life on those principles.

I first learned of him last fall after I went to the Bruce Lee event, and have been bumping up against references enough that I thought I should learn more.  It is an anecdote to all the stories of doing what some outside force is telling you to do.  To know what the price of your stance is, and to willingly pay it for the betterment of all is a courageous act.  It gives me hope amidst all the turmoil in the world: a quiet truth.

Mural of Gordon Hirabayashi/L Herlevi, Oct 2013