Those on the Other Side

Will Landschulz

Am Lit Per. 2

Mrs. LaMagdeleine

Humanity has a tendency to categorize.  Red shirts from blue shirts, fun books from text books, “greater” people from “lesser” people.  This last tendency is of greatest concern because the categorization makes the least amount of sense, and is even more arbitrary than the difference between fun and work.  Even in the 1500s, there was fighting between people who had everything in common except which church they went to (Catholic/Protestant fighting, 1562-98).  It continued up through the Civil War, with slavery and racism.  And it continues today.  An example of this is the American treatment of the Native American tribes.  The Americans told them to go live on reservations, and finally crammed them in.  Even today, injustice has not been corrected and Native Americans born on the reservation have a high risk of running into a dead end life, as the poem Indian Education by Sherman Alexie points out.  We constantly belittle them unknowingly (“This morning I pick up the sports page and read: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.  Tell me none of this is supposed to hurt very much.”  (11^th grade)).  It started with the original settlers ascribing to them unwanted elements that made them better off enclosed in reservations than blocking the way of American expansion.  Another example is, to coin a phrase, the “Muslim scare” that occurred right after the 9/11 attacks.  The Americans shrank from everyone who gave off a whiff of Mid-Eastern heritage, because we ascribed to them unwanted elements we had seen in the terrorists responsible for the attacks.  This was a similar shunning of a race simply because they looked like those who had wronged us.  In short, this was a reprisal of the Japanese internment camps set up after the attack on Pearl Harbor, albeit without the fanatical and frankly unconstitutional stance taken by the majority of the populace who didn’t know any Japanese.  After those attacks, every Japanese face, or “Jap,” as they were called, was given the same elements of opinion and character as the kamikaze soldiers at Pearl Harbor.