And then I wrote...

by Dick Schiling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that there were frequently repeated television commercials during the holiday season by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They featured photos and stories about animals which had been abandoned or mistreated by their owners. I am certain the response was “how could anyone treat an animal that way?”

Weirdly, those commercials coincided with debate in many nations, including the United States, about treatment of Muslim immigrants.

And in my own case, with two books I was reading that described in great detail the mistreatment of groups of people because of their race.

China Dolls was written by Lisa See, and published by Random House in 2014.

The Invention of Wings was written by Sue Monk Kidd, and published by the Penguin Group at Random House, also in 2014.

See’s book covers the years from 1938 to 1988, although it concentrates mostly on the war years of the early 1940s. What caught my attention was the fact that the main characters were Oriental entertainers at the Forbidden City night spot in San Francisco. A fellow officer and his wife and I went there a few times after a movie or opera. It was nowhere near as risque as the name suggests, and in fact was considered an “in” spot for tourists in particular. The book suggests a somewhat more risque early years operation.

Also covered was the internment of Japanese in camps in the west, citizens and non-citizens alike, where they were subjected to loss of property and mental torture. A few were actually collaborators with the enemy. Most were not.

Kidd’s book is about slavery of blacks in the United States from 1803 to the middle 1830s. They were not only mentally deemed inferior but also subjected to extreme physical torture and sometimes murdered. Escape from slavery was difficult, even with some manumissions and efforts by Quakers and some others.

The Japanese situation was ended rather quickly by a red-faced America. Japanese did well thereafter and continue to.

Slavery continued on more than a century more, and remnants of that era remain today.

I can certainly understand the concern about Muslim immigration after recent events. Unlike the other two, theirs is a religion, not a race, although at times it acts much as a Nation of Islam.

The nation acted precipitously in the case of the Japanese, and waited much too long in the case of slavery.

Maybe those charged with deciding the matter might well read a book or two by folks who have done research.