Building and Remembering

ENGINEERED: Sunday morning we headed to Pacific Science Center to check out their weekend event: Engineer It!

I'll let Annabelle tell you a bit more about it. ...

Engineer It! Was an event at Pacific Science Center featuring engineering students from the University of Washington, setting up multiple booths for education about all kinds of engineering. There was a spot where you could work with others to build a free-standing arch out of foam blocks. A free-standing arch is one without adhesives or anything but physics holding it together. Another booth was much larger, and there were Lego robotics fighting a la the TV show “BattleBots”. The robots had sensors to look for the other bot, and a sensor on the bottom to determine when they hit the edge of the arena.

We also visited a station where some Bioengineering students had an ultrasound machine to look at your muscles, and a second table where they explained microparticles in medicine. The microparticles can slowly release medcine, and then they just fade away and the medicine is dispersed throughout your bloodstream. Engineer It! Was super cool, but I wonder if they’re going to make it an annual event.

End of Annabelle's summary. ;)  

To clarify, not all of the booths or stations were manned, and of the ones that were, they weren't all UW students or profs. Many seemed to be staffed by young PacSci volunteers. But many were DIY, including the one below about television signals.  

 And the 'gear factory' was a spot on the floor for self-directed fun.

 Annabelle worked with a young stranger to build this arch. Their teamwork worked!

The self-serve hand battery was cool.

There were UW biomed students demonstrating an ultra sound. The kids each got to see some tendons in their wrists and found their carotid arteries.

NEVER FORGET: While we were at Engineer It! a reminder popped up on my phone letting me know that A Day of Remembrance event was starting at 2 p.m., at Fisher Pavilion. That's just footsteps away from PacSci.

We had planned to go grocery shopping after Engineer It! but when I saw that reminder and knew the event was so close, we quickly switched gears. Obviously, learning about the internment camps during WWII was more important than getting some groceries. 

"Never Forget" was the message this afternoon at Fisher Pavilion where a Day of Remembrance was held marking the 75th anniversary of the President of the United States authorizing our government to incarcerate Americans simply because they looked like the enemy.

We walked into Fisher Pavilion at about 1:50 and every seat in the big hall was already filled. Fine by me/us - I was happy there was such a great turnout! More than 1,300 people turned out for the standing-room-only event.

One of the first stops we made was at a banner. It will be carried at future civil rights marches. We were happy to have a chance to sign it.

The event started promptly at 2. Michele Storms, deputy director of the ACLU of Washington, was the afternoon's emcee. 

The first speaker was poet Troy Asaki. He shared a compelling story about his family and his heritage. It starts at about the 12 minute mark in the video I've shared below. 

While the event's speakers included Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray. However, the most poignant speech came from Tom Ikeda. His grandparents, and their six children, were incarcerated in Idaho.

One of his uncles volunteered for military service. He was killed in action. Ikeda said one of the hardest moments of the horrible ordeal was his grandparents having to hold their soldier son's funeral in the indignity of the internment camp. 

During World War II, more than 120,000 American citizens and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were rounded up, forced to give up their homes, businesses, and ways of life. They were herded into inhospitable internment camps, forced to endure years of incarceration.

Mayor Murray and Congresswoman Jayapal noted how here and now have eerie parallels to conditions that led to the awful internment camps. 

Following is CJ's report on the event:

On February 19, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then-President of the United States, signed Executive Order 9066 into law, which forced approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans into concentration camps located across the country.

Seventy five years later, some of the racist sentiments present in WWII-era America are echoed in Donald Trump's Executive Order 13769, which was an attempt to bar travelers from 7 different (predominantly Muslim) countries from entering the United States.

Yesterday, my family visited Seattle Center's Fisher Pavilion for the "Never Again: Japanese American WWII History and American Muslim Rights Today" event. According to the ACLU of Washington's website, Never Again was a presentation and conversation examining Japanese American incarceration during World War II and how it relates to racism today.

To my knowledge, three different organizations sponsored Never Again. The first of them, Densho, is a group seeking to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. The second of them, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), seeks to to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. The third group, the ACLU of Washington, is dedicated to protecting and advocating civil rights in the State of Washington.

There were multiple speakers at Never Again. One of them was Pramila Jayapal, who represents Washington's 7th District in the federal House of Representatives. Prior to entering politics, in 2001, Jayapal founded Hate Free Zone (now OneAmerica), which builds power within immigrant communities in collaboration with key allies. At Never Again, Jayapal referred to Seattle as the "moral conscience of America", presumably referring to the stance several Seattlites (myself included) and the Seattle City Government has taken in response to Donald Trump's racism. Additionally, Jayapal said that her offices had received over 14,000 pieces of mail/email so far, likely urging her to take action against Donald Trump. This caught my attention because I had actually sent her a letter encouraging her to take action against Donald Trump, and I think I know why I haven't heard anything back yet.

Sources:

https://www.aclu-wa.org/events/never-againhttp://www.densho.org/never-again-livestream/https://www.cair.com/index.phphttp://weareoneamerica.org/

If you are so inclined, you can watch the entire program we saw, you can check it out via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73MsuVZqilA

ON AIR: After the Day of Remembrance event, we walked across the Seattle Center campus to where independent radio station KEXP's cool new digs are. The station's lobby is a busy coffee shop.

You can watch the DJs broadcast live, there's a record store on site, and some cool art.