Loving Our Neighbours

 

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.
 “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  
 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 
He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind;
and your neighbour as yourself.” 
 And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 
Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,
and fell into the hands of robbers...

Luke 10
It seems these days that suspicion, hatred, and racism flow out of the United States like raw sewage, and it starts at the top. It's important to remember that the majority of Americans want to live in harmony and that there are many stories from both the present and past which are examples of compassion and generosity of spirit, if we pay attention.

I read recently about a Good Samaritan (you know the story) named Bob Fletcher, a former California agriculture inspector who, ignoring the resentment of neighbours, quit his job in the middle of World War II to manage the fruit farms of Japanese families forced to live in internment camps. Bob died in 2013 at the age of 101 but I only learned of his kindness now. I'll let others tell his story:

 

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 that made the relocation possible by declaring certain parts of the West to be military zones, Al Tsukamoto, whose parents arrived in the United States in 1905, approached Mr. Fletcher with a business proposal: would he be willing to manage the farms of two family friends of Mr. Tsukamoto’s, one of whom was elderly, and to pay the taxes and mortgages while they were away? In return, he could keep all the profits. Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Tsukamoto had not been close, and Mr. Fletcher had no experience growing the farmers’ specialty, flame tokay grapes, but he accepted the offer and soon quit his job.

 

For the next three years he worked a total of 90 acres on three farms — he had also decided to run Mr. Tsukamoto’s farm. He worked 18-hour days and lived in the bunkhouse Mr. Tsukamoto had reserved for migrant workers. He paid the bills of all three families — the Tsukamotos, the Okamotos and the Nittas. He kept only half of the profits.

Many Japanese-American families lost property while they were in the camps because they could not pay their bills. Most in the Florin area moved elsewhere after the war.

When the Tsukamotos returned in 1945, they found that Mr. Fletcher had left them money in the bank and that his new wife, Teresa, had cleaned the Tsukamotos’ house in preparation for their return. She had chosen to join her husband in the bunkhouse instead of accepting the Tsukamotos’ offer to live in the family’s house. “Teresa’s response was, ‘It’s the Tsukamotos’ house,’ ” recalled Marielle Tsukamoto, who was 5 when she and her family were sent to the Jerome center.

Most of the interned Japanese Americans and Canadians who returned to their communities after the war discovered that everything they had worked for was gone and they were forced to start again from scratch. This is such a heartening story. I'm glad Mr. Fletcher didn't live to witness another era of xenophobia, but I'm grateful for his courage to go against the tide of his time to love his neighbours.