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Photo D. Bunker

1/20/10, 11:18 pm, By David Bunker

A reminder from Manzanar

By David Bunker -

The clapboard bunkhouses are hollow and the guardhouses that needle into the air in front of Mt. Williamson are no less ominous for being deserted. At Manzanar everything holds a somber and sacred feel — a reminder of the past, and a warning about our potential future.

I happened upon Manzanar on a trip down the Eastern Sierra this summer. I'd driven by the place many times before, but never stopped long enough to understand the place's history and significance.

The short history goes like this: After a few overreported and sensationalized attempts by the Japanese to attack the West Coast of the United States during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the OK for the military to round up thousands of Japanese-Americans and hold them in detention camps.

They were pulled away from homes, businesses and friends and deposited on the windswept sage under Mt. Williamson.

For years the internees lived in rickety bunkhouses under armed guard. Some died there. Others survived to be released years later penniless and homeless.
The origins of Manzanar are rooted in an emotion that is once again alive and well in the political sphere — fear.

In fact, you would be hard pressed to come up with a driving political force more powerful than fear. Health Care, immigration, abortion, gay marriage, climate change — every weighty political topic of today is infused by fear. Fear motivates. Fear makes people act irrationally.

Fear foments. Fear unites. And politicians are stoking that fear for their own means. But as Manzanar shows, when fear and political action mix, the result is almost always disastrous.

"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd," said Bertrand Russell.

Fear draws out the beast in humanity. And that beast is instinctual and easily manipulated.

The afternoon of 9-11, I stood high in the football stands of my college and watched an acrid spear of smoke lance the sky above the Pentagon. The emotions that welled up in me — shared by perhaps every single American on the planet — were a confused mix of fear and sadness, disbelief and horror.

In the days that followed, mosques were vandalized, random people of a certain ethnicity were harangued and attacked, beat and abused.

The beast of fear had been unleashed again.

Today, there seems to be a groundswell of fear bubbling and building. It's unlike the past, when a single event set off the panic.

This is much less organic, more manipulated, like the late night circus janitor has learned how to poke and prod the disgruntled, caged animals inside us.

The janitor, who fools himself into thinking he is in charge of it all, knows the reaction he's going to get.

But when it happens, when the sedate lion roars to angry life, he's no longer in any position of power.

He's just a late night circus janitor, ill-equipped by nature to handle the violent beast clawing the cage apart in front of him.

Manzanar was a reminder for me to never lose my humanity in the face of fear. In today's political climate — where the circus janitors on TV and in the halls of power keep prodding and poking, hoping to elicit a response that they can control for their own gain — that is a challenge. But when Manzanar and other atrocities of its kind are the alternative, it's a challenge I am up for.

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