woman with a lot of spunk. Your attitude, energy and productivity puts me to shame. My yard and veggie garden have not been touched so far this year. I feel overwhelmed physically, emotionally and financially. I love your dairy it's human and real. I keep thinking we should sell our house as property values are sky rocketing here. We have a lot of equity but if we move it would get ate up by the artificial high price of housing in Portland. When I think of the money and physical work involved in getting it in shape, including a new roof, I have second thoughts. We have put a lot of money, creativity and sweat equity into this old house. I love it it and yet I hate it. It's a money pit and will always be. Think I'll hang on to what we have gathered from coincidence but then change is good, no?

Like dkmitch if we do sell it and take the money and run where in the hell would we go? Like her I picture myself with a big pile o'money at my front door and freedom beckoning and then what? I dream about moving to the coast here in Oregon. Housing is not so expensive there since the 2008 crash. All the rich Californians who owned vacation homes sold them and scurried back to CA. My husband however is a city slicker musician type who would wither on the vine in a rural sleepy beach town. Some days I look around at my surroundings and think what a great life I have. Spending so much time on the net and being able to know what is happening in the world can give you a tainted perspective of life. I thank you for the diary and found it life affirming.

Take care of your back. Heavy lifting is something I do even though I know it's asking for trouble. Moving heavy boxes of books around is harder on your back then gardening. As a gardener I get impatient as I'm the gardener in chief and also the unpaid grunt worker. I keep hauling rocks, mulch, compost and dirt around and digging in our heavy Oregon soil. I could ask my husband for some lifting hauling spreading help but often I do not want to stop and wait for him to come out and help. I'm not good at delegating or explaining on a physical level. I micro manage and have no diplomacy and we end up in endless unproductive fights while the weeds grow like weeds do.

I seem unable to get the hang of low maintenance gardening. My Chinese acupuncturist who treats my back and neck when I go berserk in the yard after sitting around all winter said ten years ago 'what's wrong with you ? your no spring chicken'. On the other hand my next door neighbor who passed away at 92 of a heart attack was out gardening until the end. He was in great shape which he attributed to keeping moving and his gardening. He would always say as we both worked our gardens 'No rest for the wicked, we must be really wicked.' Like Sisyphus I just keep rolling or hauling those stones unable to say that's good enough.

In 1942, Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in the desert, even though most were American citizens and there was no evidence of any disloyalty on their part whatsoever. It was all just based on their ancestry. The Census Bureau even supplied the government with lists.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did this by decree in Executive Order 9066. Even though you'd think the measures would be unconstitutional on their face, the government's actions were upheld by the Supreme Court in the case Korematsu v. the United States.

No, the Japanese-Americans weren't killed—they "only" suffered the stigma and psychological trauma, and the huge and irreparable loss of property and irreplaceable personal effects.

Then again, the war wasn't being fought on U.S. territory. At no point was the U.S. in danger of losing. At no point were U.S. cities suffering massive destruction from the air.

I wonder what would have happened to the Japanese-Americans if the U.S. had begun losing the war.

What if infrastructure, food, and medicine were no longer there to sustain the troops and the citizenry outside the camps, let alone the people inside the camps?

What if the anger and prejudice that put the Japanese-Americans into the camps in the first place had been intensified by fear, hardship, and looming defeat by a hated enemy? Would they have been killed or otherwise left to die in the desert?

We're inculcated with this idea that Nazi Germany was uniquely evil in all of history. It's as if there were a Richter scale of evil and repulsiveness, and all other evil in the history of the human race—slavery, conquest, imperialism, genocide against indigenous people on a continental scale—never registered higher than a 9.0. And instead of being satisfied with rating Nazi Germany as also 9.0 or 9.2 or even 9.6, we're supposed to believe it's totally off the scale, like at 17 or something.

I suspect it's all to assure ourselves that we and our allies our morally superior. That falling into such moral complacency, or just becoming so preoccupied with our own survival, that acceptance of the morally unacceptable and the monstrous could never, ever happen to us or anyone allied with us.

How can we be so sure? And who is herding us, conditioning us to think this way, and why?