Rachel Maddow

A lot of stuff is happening all at once this week.

I think it's kind of just an accident of the calendar, but it's all happening all in a very quick series of days this week.

Tomorrow, excuse me, today is President's Day.

Tomorrow is Lunar New Year.

The year of the fire horse begins with this Lunar New Year.

Ramadan starts tomorrow as well.

Also, this week is Ash Wednesday, which is the start of Lent in the Christian calendar, which is the period leading up to Christianity's holiest day, which is Easter.

I will also note, and this isn't a religious observance, it's a civil observance in the United States, but this week also happens to be when we have Remembrance Day for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Over 125,000 people locked up in prison camps in this country during World War II.

American citizens and non-citizens alike locked up purely on the basis of their race.

It was an executive order from President Roosevelt that enabled that to happen.

That executive order was signed by FDR on February 19th, 1942.

And so February 19th every year is Remembrance Day for that wildly unconstitutional and unwise decision to lock up whole families, to lock up men, women, children, elderly people, babies, lock them all up, all without trial for years in mass prison camps purely because of their race.

That Remembrance Day and all those other holidays and observances are all this week.

And the last two things I mentioned there, the Remembrance Day for Japanese-American incarceration in World War II and Ash Wednesday on the Christian calendar, those two things are sort of coming together this week in a way that I think is going to be a pretty big deal in the Chicago area.

It's gonna happen this Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, this week.

The Cardinal who leads the Archdiocese of Chicago, Cardinal Blaise Cupich, is this week, on Wednesday, going to lead an outdoor mass in Melrose Park, Illinois.

They are expecting literally thousands of people to attend.

And this service is specifically to basically stand up with both feet and to have the Catholic Church in America say, our church is a church of immigrants.

It is a stand with immigrants observation.