Limited room in the lifeboat

We are in this lifeboat (called the USA) that has only limited room and to survive, we have to limit the number of people. If we don’t, our culture will disappear.

I was born in Hawaii. Before the end of WWII my mother brought me to the States. While on our sea voyage, we were under constant threat of attack by submarines. A Japanese torpedo (two days outside of San Francisco) hit the other troop transport ship. The submarine surfaced and machine-gunned the survivors. My father, who was in the Navy at the time, was back on the Island of Oahu (Honolulu, Hawaii). My grandfather had been taken prisoner on Wake Island by the Japanese and later died in Japan. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a tall blond of German stock. Had he been born in Nazi Germany, he would have probably been an example of the so-called super race. But he was born in the USA and went on to be singled out because of his ethnicity, by the Japanese. Racists come in many varieties, my grandfather’s executioner happen to be Japanese. My Celtic surname translated into English, means black or dark stranger. My father and I are short and stocky with dark brown hair. So my father who later had his naval vessel blown out from under him and my grandfather who died in Japan, were victims of the racist policies of Imperil Japan, during WWII. My mother and grandmother had been left by themselves, on the Island of Oahu (Honolulu), for most of the war. My mother has stories of how it was to be one of two lone women with a baby, stranded in a war zone, under martial law. The night of December 7th 1941, my mother and grandmother were going to comment suicide if the Japanese had landed on the Island. They knew what the Japanese had done to women and children in China. The next day they fled into the interior, avoiding the military troops who had orders to shoot to kill. Luckily, they were able to return home without being discovered by the roadblocks. During the rest of the war, they saw death a number of times.

Before the war, my mother and her parents lived on Maui. My mother grew up on a sugar plantation. They lived a life not to far removed from the plantations in the South before the American Civil War. They didn’t have slaves but the non-whites were subclasses and my mother and her parents had servants. My grandfather fraternized with the locals and was considered a rebel by some of the other whites. My father, who was in the Navy before and during the war, met my mother on Maui. I was born on Oahu about two months after the Japanese attacked Pear Harbor. So my parents lived in Paradise before it was destroyed by the War. However, I don’t think that the locals and other nonwhites viewed it the same way as the whites. I have been back to Hawaii and to other Pacific Islands (Guam), several times and it appears that the aboriginal peoples are slowly reclaiming some of their heritage.

So in some ways like my grandfather and my father, I sometimes champion the underdog. But at the same time, we have to face that we are under siege and we have to be vigilant. There are forces that want to put our nation in peril. The ocean is filled with dangers and the sharks are circling. There will be a point when taking on more survivors could swamp the lifeboat. Being the Good Samaritan could endanger all of us regardless of what ethnic group we belong to.