In 2018, I read an article about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It is here:
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The eyewitness acount to the happening included this information:
“… August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan. A short, wiry 37-year- old Basque Jesuit priest served as Novice Master on the outskirts of the city. He tells what happened that morning:
“The roof tiles, bits of glass, and beams had scarcely ceased falling, and the deafening roar died away, when I rose from the ground and saw before me the wall clock still hanging in its place but motionless. Its pendulum seemed nailed down. It was ten minutes past eight.
“For me that silent and motionless clock has been a symbol. The explosion of the first atomic bomb has become a para-historical phenomenon. It is not a memory, it is a perpetual experience, outside history, which does not pass with the ticking of the clock. The pendulum stopped and Hiroshima has remained engraved on my mind. It has no relation with time. It belongs to motionless eternity.
“A shock in time of war, a terrible explosion of extraordinary power, these always leave an impression. For me, at that first moment, it was just one more explosion.. What did we know of the atomic bomb? We were ignorant of what that solitary B-29 had carefully laid, at a height of1700 feet, in the semi-transparent atmosphere, on that cloudy August morning. “
“The Jesuit priest was Pedro Arrupe.” From
Another excellent writing extolling the horrors of war is this one:
The War Prayer, by Mark Twain – Antiwar.com
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the …
In relation to war tortured, I never considered myself free rather than chained since I was five years old and saw Hiroshima Maidens in NYC, USA for reconstructive surgery. (You simply can’t imagine what it is like to see people with missing body parts while scarred and irradiated when you have the eyes of a five year old while knowing that your sister, parents, friends or strangers could be in this mix of them – human discards with no value unless we rise past the haters to make that value exist for the innocent harmed ones.)
Do you know about what it feels like when you’re little and young – a five year old – to be in this position? I do. It is something like this:
You are driven down to the depth of horror and, then, you look around from your terrible weakness and your utter woe, especially when as a young girl. Then you rise like an unbeatable fury in rejection of this placement.
You force the push forward against the tragic hell that scared you so much. You fight with as much power as can be mustered out of your being against the forces that made the torment that you endured. … and you do it again and again year after year as the contrary forces exude influence.
Instead of despair, my awareness eventually became empowering as it became part of my identity, Thus, it became a “wake-up call” of sorts that I would never be free since I would have to work really hard my whole life to serve humanitarian and environmental concerns.
The same position holds true for my sister, my daughter and others known to us. Truly, we have no freedom of choice. We are not free. We’re chained.
Surely, I have some very wonderful times at picnics, playing with children and others, and doing other activities. Yet my sense of self and my whole being is still not free because I will jump up at any moment to go into my core intentions in life – the ones that define me and my underlying gist or motivations.
I don’t mind the position that I have and I am happy for people who feel temporarily free. However, I am not one of them.
I accept my chained bondage in lieu of freedom. So have some friends of mine, including my sister and her husband, who have laid their lives on the line in service to others. Indeed it is joyful to be not free when we are enslaved by our ethics, values, principles, standards and morals.
Being this way defines us as being the best that we can be in ourselves. We like these sorts of restrictions and lack of liberty that define us … so no freedom for us!
Yes, we are caught on the chain like our sisters and brothers – people like Hiroshima Maidens and friends jailed while protesting our nuclear arsenal. They make us to be who we willingly and resolutely are day after day, year after year, decade after decade and century after century.
My atomic nightmare never went away — never. For example, I was so excited after getting under my desk at school in third grade, crouching and covering the bottom of my scull and my neck during a drill accompanied by a loud siren. The sound was our cue for the action to take place on the children’s parts.
I rushed home off of the school bus after our first drill and demonstrated the behavior under the dining room table for my mother. In fact, I thought that it could be a remedy so that my family wouldn’t be killed by a bomb or, as an alternative, end up like innocent Hiroshima Maidens. Well, my mother set me straight on that regard and said that it doesn’t work and only working with all of one’s might for peace does.
My ordeal went onward. Indeed, it’s a wonder that I didn’t end up with a permanent case of PTSD — Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. After all, I lived in Florida, close to Cuba, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, saw an image of a frog-like baby born dead from a Japanese woman pregnant during the atomic bombing of Japan, and saw this following information as a visual demonstration, which can be seen online:
Excerpted:
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL:
Ben Cohen. You probably remember him as the first half of Ben & Jerry’s. Think Chunky Monkey or Phish Food. But he’s not really involved with the company anymore. It was bought out by Unilever back in 2000. Nowadays, Ben has a different gig. A very different gig. He runs a non-profit called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. Instead of peddling ice cream, Ben Cohen’s trying to cut the defense budget. He came by the studio the other day with a few pints of ice cream and explained why:
BEN COHEN: Well, you know, the idea is actually to look at the federal budget in much the same way that we’d look at the budgets of our businesses. You know, you see what the needs are, you see where the money’s going. I mean, the amazing thing is, is that once you take a look at what we’re actually spending our money on, it becomes really clear that we’re continuing to spend our money on Cold War-era weapons systems. And that doesn’t do us one bit of good in terms of protecting us from terrorists. I mean, we spend $20 billion every year maintaining our nuclear arsenal.
I’ve got an interesting audio demonstration here that’ll give you an idea as to what’s going on with those weapons systems.
RYSSDAL: Sure. . . Let’s tell folks what we have here. We have a triangular, sort of metal container and a bag full of BBs.
COHEN: Right. And here we go . . . Here’s one BB. That represents the equivalent of 15 bombs the size of what blew up Hiroshima.
RYSSDAL: Alright.
COHEN: Now here’s six BBs. . . . And that would be enough nuclear weapons to blow up all of Russia.
And now, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna pour in the amount of BBs that represents our total nuclear arsenal. [pours BBs]
RYSSDAL: That’s a lot of BBs.
COHEN: Ten thousand BBs. It represents the equivalent of 150,000 Hiroshima-size bombs. That’s crazy. I mean, there’s absolutely no justification for that. You know, our board of military advisors says we can cut the amount of money we’re spending on nuclear weapons in half and still have more than enough deterent force to deter any nuclear nation and save $10 billion a year.
And what our campaign is doing is educating people about how the federal budget pie is split up.
… But we’ve got survey after survey that asks the public, How do you want your money split up. And it’s certainly not the way Congress is doing it. … From Ice cream guy takes on defense budget by Kai Ryssdal
Excerpted:
Ben Cohen: Businesses have tremendous power in this country, and our voice is our best tool. It’s crazy that in a country where schools are falling apart, we’re spending $20 billion on nuclear weapons. Having the equivalent of 150,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs at the ready does nothing to protect us from terrorists planning to sneak in a bomb through a cargo container. If we reduced the amount we spend on maintaining our nuclear weapons by a small fraction, we could reallocate those funds to improve kids’ health care and schooling. From Ben and Jerry
by Jeremy Caplan
When most people feel under threat by a virus, a bombing, Nine Eleven events or something else, they often act irrationally and lash out toward a misidentified enemy.
After Nine Eleven, a gang of crazed people killed a Sikh in California as the mob misidentified him as a Muslim due to his turban. People around five miles from my home nearly destroyed a restaurant owned by Lebanese Christians who had fled the Middle East due to their prosecution there.
Now during this time period, these sorts of dangerous out-of-control individuals are after Asians, whether a Chinese or not, and other people who caught the coronavirus who are not Asian in genetics.
Sometimes they go after people like this activist in order to exact revenge:
Mordechai Vanunu, also known as John Crossman, is an Israeli former nuclear technician and peace activist who, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986. Wikipedia
As a result, he was in prison for around 18 years, often under extreme conditions like being isolated by himself for many, many days on end with no human contact. His parents disavowed him. So US elderly Quakers adopted him as their son. Yet he never met them as he is forbidden to leave Palestine or Israel.
I am no cog in the wheel and never will be even though my government has for many years taxed me to pay for the USA nuclear arsenal. I will NEVER harm or kill people in the way that the many irrational people do in my country despite that nuclear aims and arms terrify and horrify me.
Here is my favorite poem from this anti-nuclear peace-nik:
| I Am Your Whistleblower
by Mordechai Vanunu I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. So they thought, the big ones, the smart ones, the futurologists. Answer them, said he to himself, said the little man, The clerk driver technician mechanic looked up. This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me. How Rise and cry out. Rise and tell the people. You can. I have no choice. I’m a little man, a citizen, one of the people, Come and see for yourselves. Lighten my burden. Stop the train. -1987, Ashkelon Prison |
Sally Dugman lives in MA, USA.
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