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The Grief is Long

In December, I was reminded again of Pearl Harbor Day.
I was ten years old, walking home from Sunday School,
when my mother called to say the Japanese had attacked.


I didn't know where Pearl Harbor was.  I did know about
the war in Europe, and rationing and Victory Gardens.  
Or maybe they came a bit later:  rationing of coffee and sugar
and gasoline.  That was sixty years ago.


When my mother had been in high school, in a little sawmill 
town ten miles away, there had been Japanese students
in her class.  I have her class pictures.  By 1941, they had moved
away, probably to Fife, near Tacoma, to do truck farming.


I think it is true that when I was ten, on Pearl Harbor Day,
I had never met a Japanese person, nor a Black person, either.
It is not that we were not diverse.  I had schoolmates with 
Irish names, although I had never seen the inside of a Catholic
Church, nor the Pentacostal Church, down the road, either.
We had, or were about to have, an Italian neighbor but, 
as my mother said, "she was nice".  Cosmopolitan times, what?


It struck me, this week, that the faces of people in Japan
looked a lot like the faces of neighbors.  We have changed.
We are Japanese, and Korean, Somolian, and Mexican now.
My recipes have changed with our neighborhoods and cities.
We are terribly imperfect in our diversity, but we are,
no longer, simply a European nation, born again.  


"We are the world!"  


Those survivors of that massive earthquake and tsunami
in Japan are relatives of our neighbors.  Where I was born,
in Tacoma, Washington, there are not only world citizens, 
but an equally monstrous earthquake zone, just off the coast,
measuring the tensions until it snaps, too, just as it did in Japan.
We have nuclear power plants, too.  We will have a tsunami, too.


There will be common fears and tears, grief and relief.


It has taken me a lamentably long time to learn
that our real enemies are not so much earthquake faults
and tsunamis and volcanoes, as the ignorance and stupidity
and perversity that divides our common humanity.


I know where Pearl Harbor is now, and where Japan is.
I have been to Germany, and I wish we were not at war
in Iraq, and Afghanistan.  The grief is long.  
.

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