Politics & Power Quote by Mike Honda

Honda’s line compresses a national shame into two blunt measurements: family and time. By opening with “My own family,” he refuses to let internment live as an abstract policy debate or a footnote in a textbook. He’s staking credibility not through ideology but through lived evidence, then widening the aperture to “thousands of other Japanese Americans” to make clear this wasn’t an anomaly; it was a system.

The second sentence is where the indictment lands. “It took our nation over 40 years to apologize” isn’t nostalgia, it’s a timeline of moral lag. The passive cruelty of internment is paired with the slow-motion decency of redress, suggesting a country that can mobilize quickly to cage its citizens and glacially to admit it was wrong. “Our nation” is a strategic pronoun: Honda speaks as an American patriot who is still demanding accountability from the team he’s on. That choice denies listeners the easy exit of treating internment as someone else’s sin.

The context matters: Honda, a Japanese American congressman, is channeling memory into policy. The reference points toward the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, the formal apology and reparations. But the subtext is contemporary: fear can rebrand itself, target selection can change, and due process can evaporate with bipartisan speed. The quote isn’t just historical testimony; it’s a warning about how long justice takes once the cameras move on.