It’s happening again. Desperate people, fleeing from persecution by the Nazis in Germany, were turned away when their escape ship tried to let them enter Florida. They were, after all, different from us. They were JEWS! I can remember the prejudice against Jews that existed then. My mother shared this prejudice. She poo-pooed the music of Mendelsohn, saying “he was just trying to show that he was as good as the other composers.” I was taking lessons on the violin at the time. My violin teacher said that Jews were great musicians but no good at anything else. My father admired Albert Einstein. My father did not share the prejudice against Jews.
Going forward in time about eighty years, we have lost our prejudice and fear of Jews. Today we are prejudiced against foreigners with more skin pigment than I have: Mexicans, Arabs, some Asians. In particular we seem to have a prejudice and fear of Syrian refugees. I am ashamed of my country. Actually, I am outraged at my country. I take some comfort in living in California. The governor of California has not said anything about not letting Syrian refugees enter our state. So far, we Californians welcome these desperate, unhappy people who have fled death in their own land. It gives me little comfort to know that fifty years hence all Americans will regret the attitudes and statements of many state governors refusing to allow any of the refugees into their states.
In the nineteenth century we tried to exterminate the native Americans and succeeded in destroying many of their languages. Native children were taken from their parents and put in “English only” schools. Now, finally, we regret what we have done and some of us support Indian schools where the native language is an important part of the curriculum. It is our fate to regret our bad deeds long after it is too late to correct them, We can not bring back the refugees that we refused to save from Hitler’s gas ovens. We can not restore the culture and language of many vanished tribes of native Americans. Are we doomed to repeat this mistake with the Syrian refugees?