Social malevolence will most always manifest itself and prevail whenever otherwise good people fail to resolutely confront and address blatant injustice whenever and wherever they see it occur.

In the fall of 2003, I had the distinct privilege of witnessing the late Fred Korematsu receive in person the Patsy Mink Award from the Univ. of Hawaii's William Richardson School of Law, for his courageous opposition to the internment of himself and the other 100,000-plus Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War. At the time of the award, he had just filed an amicus curiae in support of the right of prisoners at Guantanamo NAS to assert habeus corpus in their legal contest with the Bush administrtion over their detention without indictment or trial.

But the person who truly impressed me that night was Mrs. kathryn Korematsu, an elderly but equally compelling Italian-American woman of few words, who had been forcibly separated from her husband during the war, and whose repeated entreaties to federal officials to allow her to join her childhood sweetheart at Manzanar were summarily rebuffed each time.

Asked for her thoughts, Mrs. Korematsu just looked around the overflowing lecture hall, as though she was taking our collective measure. Then, with a few tears and a strong but quivering voice, she implored the audience to stand for what's right in the face of official misdeeds.

"When you witness an obvious wrong committed in our government's name," Mrs. Korematsu challenged each of us, "for God's sake, please, don't just stand there mute -- say something, don't let it go unchallenged!"