not unique to the long past. Just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which forced the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese decent. Gripped by hysteria, the government, in a crime frighteningly similar to Nazi Germany, dehumanized thousands of Japanese. Our government did not intern Germans and Italian citizens along with the Japanese. In a demonstration of ethnocentric pride, we interned only the Japanese. And this pride prevented us from attempting to reparate past wrongs until fifty years later.Surviving Japanese-Americans who were interned during WWII received twenty thousand dollars and an official apology from the United States government in 1988 for the violation of liberty and property. No apology or monetary sum, however, could possibly reparate the psychological trauma suffered by these innocent men, women, and children; and, by the time we officially apologized, half of the internees had already died.All men do make mistakes, even the infallible Catholic Church and the exemplary democracy of the United States of America. It is always best to repair the suffering one's pride has caused, but often times, the damage is irreparable and an apology is too little too late. Antigone ended tragically. Joan of Arc died at the early age of nineteen. And, Japanese-Americans were subjected to cruelty that parallels the Holocaust. Men may in retrospect realize that their past actions were wrong, but is it ever possible to repair an evil?...
