America's War on Language

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 8:58 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is a tribute to the melting pot that the largest ethnic minority in the
> Homeland, German Americans, didn't need to be interned during two world
> wars, and even marched off in droves against their Vaterland.  With the
> ethnicity boom,  the pot got shoved to the back burner.
>

After Pearl Harbor, some Japanese-Americans were able to avoid internment
by moving east. My friend, Hideo, then a first-grader, moved with his
family to Iowa. In school, one day, the teacher handed out
construction-paper and told the pupils to draw something, color it, and cut
it out. Hideo, for no particular reason, chose to go with a nice swastika.

Before dawn the next day, his house was raided by the FBI. The family was
released, after he explained that the swastika was only an innocent,
childish mistake. Hideo had had no idea that the U.S. was at war with
Germany, too. "I thought that we were only fighting Japan!"


-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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