While reading the Crucible, I felt many emotions. I felt love for the well-developed characters, sadness when said characters died, and anger. Now, when I say anger, this is only because there are no appropriate words to explain to you the deep loathing I felt for some of the characters and the lengths they were willing to go to get what they wanted. Every day after reading, I could always leave class content, knowing that this is just an exaggerated story. Except you look back and these things did happen; people did die. You feel slightly uneasy, knowing that people really did die in such a horrific way, but you shake it off--this kind of fearmongering only happened once, right? Though you look deeper and you see this has always happened,
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Hundreds of Japanese warplanes flew by overhead, on their way to Pearl Harbor, on their way to the end of life as America had known. A total of seventeen naval vessels were sunk or damaged. With these vessels, 2,403 Americans lost their lives that day. On that day, life was forever changed for Japanese Americans, and it definitely wasn’t for the better. Skipping ahead to roughly two months after these attacks and President Roosevelt signed away the lives of 110,000 Japanese Americans with the Executive Order 9066. The War Department could now place anyone they thought to be a danger into internment camps. Thousands of German- and Italian-Americans were locked away, but the real targets were the Japanese Americans. In the hysteria that followed the events of Pearl Harbor, no one could be convinced that their once trusted neighbors were peaceful and meant them no harm. For decades, Japanese immigrants could no longer eat with whites, own land, or become naturalized citizens. The feelings are really encapsulated in this sentence: “If all of the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them… because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.” Head of the Western Defense Command Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt said, “The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.” People held the irrational fear that even though they knew these people, they didn’t really know them. They were afraid that they had been hiding secrets and were secretly terrorists disguised as trusted
Hundreds of Japanese warplanes flew by overhead, on their way to Pearl Harbor, on their way to the end of life as America had known. A total of seventeen naval vessels were sunk or damaged. With these vessels, 2,403 Americans lost their lives that day. On that day, life was forever changed for Japanese Americans, and it definitely wasn’t for the better. Skipping ahead to roughly two months after these attacks and President Roosevelt signed away the lives of 110,000 Japanese Americans with the Executive Order 9066. The War Department could now place anyone they thought to be a danger into internment camps. Thousands of German- and Italian-Americans were locked away, but the real targets were the Japanese Americans. In the hysteria that followed the events of Pearl Harbor, no one could be convinced that their once trusted neighbors were peaceful and meant them no harm. For decades, Japanese immigrants could no longer eat with whites, own land, or become naturalized citizens. The feelings are really encapsulated in this sentence: “If all of the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them… because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.” Head of the Western Defense Command Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt said, “The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.” People held the irrational fear that even though they knew these people, they didn’t really know them. They were afraid that they had been hiding secrets and were secretly terrorists disguised as trusted