Political Quotes

“When 7-year-old Danny Inouye saw the Japanese planes over his Hawaii home on December 7, 1941, his first impulse was to help. So he ran to help. He had emergency medical training. He used that training to help bind the wounds of the Americans injured in the attack on Pearl Harbor. His second impulse, just as strong, was to defend our country. But the America of 1941 did not want his service. In fact, it considered Danny and his fellow Japanese Americans suspect and called them enemy aliens and confined more than 100,000 of them to internment camps. When Danny Inouye tried to enlist to defend his country, his country told him: You are not welcome. That Danny Inouye did not allow anger and resentment to overcome his love of country says something remarkable about him and about our country. When in 1943 President Roosevelt allowed Japanese Americans to enlist in the fight against Nazi Germany, Inouye and thousands of young men answered the call. He burned with desire to defend the Nation that had told him and people of his background: You may not serve; a nation that still held thousands of Japanese Americans behind barbed-wire fences. When he left Hawaii for the Army, his father told him: This country has been good to us. Whatever you do, do not dishonor this country. Danny, on more than one occasion, told stories about his Army training in Mississippi, about the racial segregation he saw.…”