2. YOU WILL LEARN LESSONS.
You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, ONLY LESSONS.
Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works”.

4. A LESSON IS REPEATED UNTIL IT IS LEARNED.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. Then you can go on to the next lesson.

5. LEARNING LESSONS DOES NOT END.
There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

Americans tend to conflate the idea of “concentration camps” with “death camps” because that’s how the simplified version of the war’s history presents them. Most of the concentration facilities run by the Nazi regime eventually became “death camps,” especially once it was clear that the Reich was on the back foot—but on the most literal level, the purpose of a concentration camp is right there in the name: to concentrate a group of people (often considered “undesirable”) in a limited space for ease of both containment and control.

In that sense, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is absolutely correct about what we are doing to undocumented immigrants in this country: we are placing them in concentration camps. We needn’t be yanking their gold teeth, performing medical experiments on them, or shoving them all into a concrete room for a “shower” (please understand that I’m not making light of any of those things) in order for the fact that they’re in concentration camps to be true.

We did the same thing to Japanese-Americans during WW II—we just like to tell ourselves it was different from what the Reich was doing because we weren’t actively feeding anyone to furnaces.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is absolutely correct to call the camps we’re detaining other human beings in “concentration camps.” She’s being called out because of the emotional resonance that term has in our history that exists entirely separately from its clinical meaning, but she is not wrong.

It’s just kinda galling to watch the people who’re freaking out over her (admittedly pathos-based-and-triggering) phrasing also praise Trump’s categorization of our undocumented immigration situation as “an invasion” (which is another pathos-steeped loaded label specifically designed to elicit an emotional response).

“Fear is nothing more than a feeling.” Chuin says, in a rare moment of sympathy. “You feel hot. You feel hungry. You feel angry. You feel afraid. Fear can never kill you.”

It is a feeling. Like other feelings. But unlike the others, we judge ourselves horribly, call ourselves cowards, or think that fear means we can’t, or shouldn’t, or mustn’t. No.

It is just fear.