Are we overreacting? Or do we really need to quit living with past hostilities?

There’s a site on Facebook I enjoy checking out from time to time called Original Chicago. Basically, it’s a place where long-time city residents (and others who no longer live here) can reminisce about the way things used to be.

The Maxwell Street of old, as memorialized in this pre-World War II postcard. Image provided by Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia

Favorite roller rink? Is the novel, “The Devil in the White City” (set during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892) accurate? Things like that.

BUT THINGS GOT a little more serious Thursday when the site’s administrator felt the need to post a critical note about people who referred to the old Maxwell Street district as “Jew Town.”

It’s a sign of “racial disrespect” that “will not be tolerated” at the site, the administrator wrote.

Which is an attitude I can respect because I often think it cowardly for website operators who refuse to control the content of their own sites – trying to claim that letting people randomly post their often stupid and ridiculous comments encourages free expression of thought.

Actually, it just encourages the idiots of our society to engage in bullying behavior. My own thought to people who want to make such rants is they ought to create their own sites (I’ll gladly offer them technical advice on how to do so). Although I suspect what they really want to do is undermine other peoples’ activity online.

BUT BACK TO “Jew Town,” which triggered an extensive series of responses from people who want to think the phrase has significant historic character to Chicago. Of course, most of them will go on to tell tales of all the stolen goods that wound up being resold there.

How dare we want to think it is wrong to use the phrase to describe a part of Chicago that once upon a time contained a heavy presence of people who were Jewish in religion and were the operators of the original businesses that existed in the area (which now is an upscale area by the University of Illinois at Chicago campus).

Some people literally are claiming that “Jew Town” is no different than “China Town” or any of the nicknames given in the past to enclaves of Polish immigrants (don’t forget Chicago used to brag there were more Poles, not Polacks, living here than in any city on Earth except Warsaw – the capital of Poland).

I don’t doubt that people in the past used “Jew” freely when referring to Jewish people, the same way that “Jap” used to be openly used when referring to Japanese.

THE LATTER ALSO is a slur that was meant to make those from the Asian island nation sound less than human – which I’m sure seemed right to those who came of age during the Second World War and wanted to forevermore think that Japanese people were worthy of derision.

But just as now we think it ridiculous whenever some old coot complains that we need to “Remember Pearl Harbor!” because they’re not willing to let go a war our government ended many decades ago (and rebuilt Japan in our own capitalist image), somehow, the idea of somebody thinking that “Jew Town” isn’t absurd is the real ridiculous notion.

The notion is that we need to let go our old obsessions and terminology that we used to justify them. It’s called advancing as a society. Even though some are going to complain it’s “political correctness run amok.”

The latter concept always struck me as being the thought process of old bigots who don’t want to be called out for the stupidity of their thoughts.

Is Chinatown similar to Maxwell Street in history, meaning?

SERIOUSLY, WHEN WAS the last time you ever heard anybody call a police squadrol a “Paddy wagon?” Even though I can recall that once was a commonly accepted term for the vehicle used to haul large loads of arrestees (a batch of drunken Irish?) from a crime scene – or take corpses to the morgue.

It’s time for some people to get with the program. Jewish people are “Jewish,” and “Jew” is only used by people who feel the need to think derogatory thoughts. Consider the dictionaries that give an alternate definition for “Jew” as “someone tight with their money or not very generous.”

Who still uses the old slur?

That certainly doesn’t sound like somebody trying to think seriously about an issue. It sounds like pure religious-motivated bile to me, which ought to be further reason to dump “Jew Town” from our city’s lingo. It’s embarrassing to our civic memory, and it’s not like people using the term now are trying to illustrate how absurd we used to be.

Better to get back to debates such as the man who asked Original Chicago readers what to do about the girlfriend who persists in putting ketchup on her hot dogs. Largely because I don’t put ketchup on anything, I say, “Dump her!”

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We hear the facts of 75 years ago; but have we really learned a lesson?

It has been 75 years since the date that “lives in infamy” (or so says FDR), and just over 15 years since the alleged sequel date when the Pentagon and World Trade Center were the targets of people who decided to hijack commercial jetliners for their personal use as bombs.

A little ridiculously over the top, in retrospect

Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001 do have one thing in common (even though I hardly consider a batch of religiously-motivated thugs the equivalent of the militaristic empire of Japan back in the 1940s).

THEY ARE DATES that the more paranoid segments of our society like to trot out as justification for their isolationist thoughts about the way we all ought to live our lives.

As though we live in their warped, paranoid world and have to merely accept it as the way things are!

Flipping around the massive lineup of cable television channels this past weekend eager to fill up all that airtime, I stumbled across several documentaries focusing on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the Second World War.

All of which highlighted the intense hostility that developed in this country for anything connected to Japanese people in ways that were never felt toward anyone espousing fascism or wearing swastika armbands (even though there is evidence that the old German-American Bund was more of a threat to the U.S. in those days than Japanese-ethnics who had emigrated to this country).

ALL TOO SIMILAR to the hostilities often expressed these days by a segment of our society that is determined to view the Islamic religion, or anything to do with Arab people regardless of what religion they practice, as something bordering on subversive that is best eradicated from this country.

Has the passage of time ...

I’d hope we don’t get to the point of anyone seriously proposing internment camps for Muslims (although I have heard people try to claim that the viewpoint toward Japanese all those years ago justifies the current attitude toward Arabs).

Even though there are those amongst us who view the campaign rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump toward Muslims (all that talk of mass deportation) as being equally offensive as the past Japanese-American policies.

Too similar to the official attitude of the United States toward many of those would-be immigrants of the Jewish faith who tried to flee Nazi-era Germany persecution – only to be turned away at Ellis Island or any other U.S. port of entry.

... taught us a lesson?

HOW MANY OF those who perished in the notorious Nazi concentration camps died thinking the idea of an “American dream” was a crock of lies?

Just as those who seem to want some sort of official U.S. hostile policy toward the Islamic religious faith appear to be guilty of George Santayana’s fear; “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

For some of us seem to have not learned the lessons of our past mistakes – or are so determined to believe we never make mistakes that we rewrite the past in our own minds to make it seem far more noble than it ever was. Similar to those who took Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan seriously.

This country has had its moments of greatness, but not for the reasons the Trump-ites would cite.

YES, I VIEW the results of last month’s elections (which will be confirmed in coming weeks by the actions of the Electoral College) as evidence that the national mood hasn’t learned from past mistakes – the nation made a statement in favor of paying greater attention to those who apparently went through high school history thinking the topic was boring.

Parody is what some Trump backers want to become reality!

Because some of us haven’t learned a thing, and they’re determined to spread their vacuous sensibilities amongst the rest of us.

With regards to the concept of internment camps, I once wrote a commentary speculating that hostilities toward Latinos were growing to the point where I might someday wind up receiving some sort of compensation payment similar to what was eventually paid to Japanese-American survivors of those 1940s-era camps.

Although I now realize there’s no way these nativist-types would ever do such hostilities because even they know we’re desperately needed here to do the actual work to prevent their vision of an Anglo-led society from devolving into a real “third world” nation.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Personally, I'd rather reminisce about 1941 being the year of baseball greats Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams giving us the on-field accomplishments (the 56-game hit streak and .406 batting average respectively) for which they're still remembered all these years later. Yes, I also recently saw a repeat of Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary -- specifically the segment about the 1940s and how quickly we in this country went from a sports-mindset to a war-mindset. With even DiMaggio and Williams feeling compelled to enlist into military service. Could anyone envision Kris Bryant or any modern ballplayer taking similar action?

Heck, I think I'd even rather remember the year for that dreadful early-1980s film "1941" that gave us the sight of actor John Belushi as an Army Air Corps pilot determined to be the first to shoot down a Japanese plane over U.S. soil. Will anyone of the future have positive thoughts about the year 2016? That is, with the exception of Chicago Cubs fans who will probably spend the rest of their lives forcing us all to remember what occurred!

The REAL threat to our society from a decade ago was letting our fear run amok

A lot of people are spending this weekend resurrecting their memories of what they did a decade ago Sunday, looking for some anecdote that feels to them like it ought to have great significance.

For me, however, the moment I still recall was one that occurred about five days (maybe it was six) after the hijacked jets hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I HAPPENED TO be listening to a radio station that was accepting calls from listeners. I can’t remember the exact station or much in details because I was flipping around the dial. It wasn’t some radio program that I regularly listened to.

But what caught my attention was a woman who (if she was being honest, and I have no reason to think she lied) was in her late-60s back then. Which meant she was a young girl during the years that the United States was involved in the Second World War.

Many people were quick  to compare the attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor in 1941 with the idea of Islamic fanatics wanting to commit a violent act against the western world – and thinking that it was time the United States and New York (instead of London, Paris or Tel Aviv) took a hit.

We still hear people who, in all earnestness, compare Dec. 7, 1941 to Sept. 11, 2001

THIS WOMAN, HOWEVER, took the comparison to a new level – one that still scares me whenever I recall it. Because it is frightening that anyone who could think of themselves as a rational human being could make this leap of logic.

She said that we should now be fully appreciative of the mood of the country back in 1942 when our federal government did one of its more shameful acts – approved the plan by which people of Japanese ethnicity were put away in internment camps and had the lives they had built for themselves in this country seized away.

A touching moment,in a pathetic situation 



She said the fear that she believed we all now felt toward Arabs (as though all Arabs, and only Arabs, are Muslim) was the same as was felt toward people whose families came from Japan.

She didn’t quite come out in favor of internment camps for Arabs in this country. But she did say that she expected NEVER AGAIN to hear people criticize the United States for what happened to Japanese ethnics – then living mostly on the West Coast.

AS THOUGH WE’RE now supposed to realize such treatment was acceptable. Maybe she had delusions of reparations payments being returned by those people and their descendants to the U.S. government?

Sound ridiculous?

The radio host thought so. He quickly told this woman what should have appeared to be the truth to anyone who thinks rationally – that what was done some seven decades ago was reprehensible and what we ought to learn from history is not to act so irrationally once again.

No singling out Arabs for abuse or mistrust. Especially since most of the Arabs I have ever known personally were either Christian or specifically came to this country to get away from those crazy fanatics who could seriously rationalize in their minds that Allah would take it as a gesture of religious faith to cause explosions that kill nearly 3,000 people in just a few hours.

WE OUGHT TO want more people like that living in this country. Not that the woman was swayed.

She became offended, and I seem to recall that she abruptly hung up the telephone – at which point I flipped around to another radio station.

My guess is that if she was still alive a few years ago when filmmaker Ken Burns did his documentary series on World War II, she hated it because he devoted significant amounts of airtime to the stories of Japanese ethnics who were mistreated – and yet still felt the need to fight on behalf of this country.

What sticks in my mind is that it was around this point that I realized we had to be very careful about what we did – or else the conservative ideologues of our society were going to run amok and scare a whole lot of people into keeping quiet about their concerns for freedom and liberty in our society – which is what our troops subsequently were sent into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect.

IT WAS AT that moment that I realized the idea that our society was coming together as one was just a short-term myth. Fear is never a force that brings people together.

I only wish I could say this sentiment had somehow died down during the past decade. Yet it was just on Friday that I read a commentary on the Illinois Review website – one that criticizes Gov. Pat Quinn for some of his appointments of Islamic organization leaders to a state council on Muslim concerns.

The right-leaning website reminds us that both the Islamic Society of North America and the Council of American Islamic Relations were named as unindicted co-conspirators in a federal criminal case conducted in Texas.

A jury never found anyone guilty. But as the website tells us, “the suspicion surrounding ISNA and CAIR affiliation(s) remains in federal records.”

SO MUCH FOR the all-American concept of “innocent until proven guilty.” Perhaps some six decades from now, someone who is now a teenager will try to justify some future harassment by claiming our current mistrust of Arabs supports it.

We truly are doomed to repeat history!

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