Not my usual Love All Creatures Great and Small self.
Why, seventy years after they were gathered up and shipped off to internment camps in their own country by the great Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt, are Japanese Americans not prostrate and demoralized by bitterness and distrust, living lives of poverty, crime and violence?
Why, seventy years after six million of them were gathered up and shipped off to death camps by the National Socialists, are the Jews not a crushed and dysfunctional race, but are still dominating any field of endeavor they get involved in and running the only functional democratic state in the Middle East?
Why, indeed, are the Germans, or the Japanese for that matter, sixty years after being bombed into oblivion and humiliated by a crushing military defeat, foreign occupation and, in Deutschland's case, then divided further by a brutal and soulless totalitarian dictatorship for yet another forty five years, --to say nothing of the lingering effects of losing an earlier war that century--not the Detroit of Europe, but instead are its bankers, policy makers and anchor?
Why, sixty years after a nasty and devastating war that followed on a savage Japanese occupation, one which has left their country still divided, are the South Koreans not the beggars and madmen of Asia, but one of the richest places on earth?
Why, even, a hundred and fifty years after watching millions of their families and countrymen die of starvation and being forced to disperse all over the globe, to America, Australia and Canada, have the Irish not remained the luckless godforsaken wanderers of Europe?
And closer to home, why, fifty years after suddenly losing the single industry that utterly shaped and marked and structured its character and existence, has the city of Pittsburgh, rather than funding PR at Superbowls about its ever-imminent and never-actual comeback, become "the most liveable city in America"?
Unsympathetic me asks, "Why?"
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