Takei: How America First puts many of us last

It has been my life’s mission to ensure we learn important lessons from the past so that we don’t repeat them. That’s why this week, I presented a petition of support for Muslims in the USA, signed by more than 300,000 concerned Americans who oppose President Trump’s immigration ban, to the Muslim Public Affairs Council. It’s why I will speak Sunday at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library about his Executive Order 9066 that placed Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

Perhaps most personally, on Feb. 19, known as the Day of Remembrance, the film of my Broadway musical Allegiance will have an encore screening in theaters, in partnership with Fathom Events. It tells the story of a Japanese-American family, much like mine, during the internment.

I remember that day when American soldiers came to our home, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets, and ordered our family out. I was 5 years old. We were put on a train with armed soldiers at both ends of each car, as if we were criminals, and transported to Arkansas. 

I remember the barbed wire fence of the internment camp, the tall sentry towers with machine guns pointed down at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from our barrack to the latrine. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. To go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. I could see the barbed wire fence and the sentry tower right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words “with liberty and justice for all”— too young to feel the stinging irony in those words.

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