Editor’s note: A very special thank you to George Takei, who posted this piece on his Facebook page. We are deeply grateful.
George Takei has become known as not only the actor who portrayed “Mr. Sulu” on the original Star Trek TV series, but as a humorous and engaging LGBT activist. But in this President Barack Obama endorsement video he recorded for the campaign, Takei wears a different hat — a representative of the Asian American community, as he tells of the “memory seared” into his brain when “soldiers came marching up our driveway” and his family and he — at the age of five — were locked up in World War II internment camps.
“We were in prison, behind barbed wire fences, for four years, for the duration of the war, simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. We were American citizens, yet, because of who we were, what we looked like, we were in prison, without due process.”
Stop right now and imagine a five-year old George Takei, in prison. That was America seventy years ago. It may make you cry, at least a little. It did me.
“But, we have, as an Asian-American community, low voter registration,” Takei states. “We’ve got to be actively involved in the electoral process. And if you really appreciate the price that has been paid, for that right, you should be in there participating, protecting our interests, and, in so doing, making our democracy a truer democracy.”
“We have a unique opportunity to support a president who is a part of us. He grew up in Hawaii, the ‘Aloha’ spirit, his sister’s half-Asian. He understands, and loves, the Asian-American community.”
George Takei is a gift to America.
And he’s right — we need everyone to register and vote.
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