Heidi Stevens: Forgetting -- or erasing -- the past is a sure path to repeating it. Now more than ever

I was 20 years old before I learned about the Japanese internment camps.

It was 1995 and I was living and working near Washington, D.C., for the summer before my senior year of college. I had an internship at the Student Press Law Center, and on the weekends my intern bestie Stephanie and I would walk around the city looking for things to do for free. (I believe our summer stipends were $700, an early lesson not to pursue journalism for the money.)

The Smithsonian came through. Walking around the exhibit halls of the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Portrait Gallery and other storied institutions, I learned things that summer that forever changed the way I understood the world — including, especially, how little I knew.

At the National Museum of American History that year, there was an exhibit called, “A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution.” It contained stories and artifacts detailing the forced removal of close to 120,000 Japanese Americans — most of whom were U.S. citizens — from their homes and into detention camps during the opening months of World War II.

I remember seeing photos of families living behind barbed wire and waiting in long lines for food and I felt deeply embarrassed that I had never so much as heard of, let alone reflected on, that experience that so many thousands of people endured.

It was hardly the first — and not nearly the last — time my safe, suburban, sheltered youth proved to be an unreliable narrator of the world around me. Which isn’t to say I’m not incredibly grateful for my childhood; just that the older I got, the more I realized how incomplete my worldview really was, and how gaping my blind spots really were.

That specific moment in the National Museum of American History stands out though. I think because it happened at a time when I was newly immersed in the study of journalism and the power of the press and the heady, if naive, notion of using your pen to right (and write) the world’s wrongs. And here I was, standing in my nation’s capital, learning how few of the wrongs I’d even heard of.

I'm thinking about that moment a lot lately.

In part because the Smithsonian museums are in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who believes they’re too “woke.”

“The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history,” the Wall Street Journal reported in August. “Areas under scrutiny range from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.”

And in part because armed military personnel are, according to officials, on their way to Chicago to raid immigrant communities.

"It breaks my heart to report that we have been told ICE will try and disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said during a news conference Tuesday. "Let's be clear: the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here."

This is taking place during a local and national spike in arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including soaring numbers of people arrested without criminal charges or convictions.

It’s taking place a month after the State Department in August halted visas for people traveling to the United States with a Palestinian passport. Meaning the injured children from Gaza who are receiving medical treatment in the Chicago area through HEAL Palestine, a nonpolitical, nonprofit humanitarian organization, may be the last admitted to the U.S.

It’s taking place during an ongoing war in Ukraine, which has created the largest European refugee crisis since World War II.

And it’s taking place 30 years after I stood in front of that exhibit and thought, stupidly, naively, that families being torn apart and immigrants being forced into detention camps and children’s suffering being ignored and American presidents signing off on it all were in our past.

And I wonder if we have it in us, collectively, meaningfully, sustainably, to look around and say no more. To see a child — anyone’s child, on anyone’s soil — broken and hungry and terrified and think about what it would do to our hearts if that child was ours. And then think about their mother's heart. Or father's heart. Hearts that work exactly like ours, despite whatever rhetoric is coming from the White House.

And then act and call and email and march and donate and volunteer and vote accordingly. Because the best thing we can do with our past is to learn from it and let it lead us toward a more just and humane and loving present.

And I do believe we have that in us. I honestly do.