The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
Rest in peace.

So, the end finally came, today.

After so long.

A person died today, in a sunny American state overseen by a Republican governor, in a pretty town on the coast by a bay.

This noble American will be remebered by other Americans for a long time to come.

After a life marked by such cruel blows of fate, but a fierce will to live.

After years spent silenced. Ignored by too many for too long, who didn't know of, care about or understand their plight until it was far too late.

After years closed off from the world. Confined to a space that promised no escape ever. Voiceless.

After the years of litigation, seeking some ray of hope, some justice, some humanity.

But where even our U.S. Supreme Court passed the buck, with the lame excuse that its hands were tied, that some other branch of government was responsible and could, if it wanted to, put things right and save the life in question.

After those unelected judges refused to see that a precious human life was at stake. And not just one human life, but a life representing countless others, young, old and still unborn, who were or could be in the same situation someday.

After even the President -- the one who guided our country in the smouldering aftermath of that devastating surprise attack on us wreaked by those from outside our borders, who stayed resolute though our darkest hour of fear, who sent our soldiers across the seas to help defeat a madman who invaded neighboring countries and gassed innocent citizens in his own country, the president who has been hailed by some as a great liberator of millions -- even he turned his back, bowing to the winds of political expediency, when he could have saved the poor soul with the stoke of a pen. Can it be that the President's overwhelming fixation on securing our shores and homeland actually blinded him from seeing the life of an individual, and their rights?

But this poor, newly departed soul had the support of countless loved ones, who stood by and kept the faith through the years.

May history remember this special American.

Their name has become and will continue to be an inspiration to many. It will invoke the lesson that, even if we can't seek immediate redress from a president who turns away and the cowardly judges who stand aside while an inhuman act of gigantic proportions takes place, we will get justice against them someday, maybe even an apology and an acknowledgement that they did wrong. Even if it takes forty years or so to get it.

I am speaking of course about the late Fred Korematsu, who died today in San Fransicso.

[update 1/11/07: The above was written in part as an experiment in perspectivism triggered by a prolonged media furor that culminated on the date I posted it.]

posted by TiR at 9:44 PM