News to Heal Your Blues

Related Link » In Praise of Cheerful Men

h/t Townhall.com

“WASHINGTON -- Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum here, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese-American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas. […] Such cheerful men, who helped to lop 988 years off the Thousand Year Reich, are serene reproaches to a nation now simmering with grievance groups that nurse their cherished resentments. The culture of complaint gets no nourishment from men like these who served their country so well while it was treating their families so ignobly. Yet it is a high tribute to this country that it is so loved by men such as these. The Holocaust museum draws almost 2 million visitors a year, four times more than were anticipated when it opened 17 years ago. A museum official says dryly, "Human nature has been an enormous help." She means that atrocious behavior, a constant component of the human story, continually reminds people of the museum's relevance. It is, therefore, grand that the museum also honors those, like Ito, Akagi and Ichiyama, who exemplify the rest, and best, of that story.”
— by George Will, April 25, 2010 (Townhall)

 WGBH / PBS program about Susumu Ito

Post #1,233 News to Heal Your Blues