Do all lives still matter?

My friend Jane and I sat in our garden on a bench just before dusk, catching up on our lives. Jane, whose son is half Japanese, was telling me about the passion of  George Takei, the former Star Trek actor, who spent his childhood between ages 5 and 9 in a Japanese internment camp in the swamps of Arkansas, his family forced to abandon their belongings and start over with nothing on Los Angeles' Skid Row after the war. The internment camps that proliferated on the American landscape during the Second World War are often left out of history books and are seldom discussed by Japanese American families who see no reason to stir the shame they still feel at the way they were treated.

But now, George Takei sees a reason. At 82, he wants to make sure all Americans know what was done to some of its citizens. "This nation has a long and tragic history of separating children from their parents, ever since the days of slavery, " he says. "I have to tell this story before there is no one left to tell it." Takei's new graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy, has just been released and next month he will appear in an AMC series, The Terror: Infamy, set in a Japanese internment camp.

As we all know, the internment camps are back with a vengeance. History doesn't repeat itself, I heard someone say, but there sure are sequels. Well, then, let's rewrite the sh*t out of this one. As a bumper sticker my cousin sent me the other day said: