Forever imminent is not an oxymoron. It’s a readily observable fact. We have been living far too long with the inconvenient truth of nuclear weaponry.
Two towering exclamation points have been writ high on the sky, each an indelible imprint on human consciousness. Hiroshima! Nagasaki!
And yet, 70 years later, through the countless wars that have followed WWII, on the surface of the fracturing social, economic and political global landscape, humanity dreams on, unaware and unforgiven.
Nuclear weapons are non-human and have become non-political, for they no longer have any strategic use for those who consider themselves sane. In October 1962, they were bargained away from being used, but that was by a razor-thin rationale that then existed and fortunately prevailed. Now, 54 years later, will equally rational leaders appear and prevail? Nukes, as they are affectionately termed, were born of dark holes in the human spirit.
The mad impossibility of reducing and eliminating these pet monsters is countered by the insanity of our acceptance of their existence. We need to believe they are under total control, as we peacefully go to sleep, yet once again, on this night. How is it that we are able to sleep? After spending our days locked in a dream world, conjured by machinations of the media/corporate/media complex.
Does Facebook, where masses of individuals now live, drug us into enticing complacency? Is Internet addiction a new form of anti-anxiety medication, along with consumerism and the whole circus of available distractions? What is it that conspires to keep us from meaningful reflection and a healthy and natural life?
All of us now strain, socially, economically and human-spiritually, to keep up with The Machine. As wealth is automatically sucked upward and the common man’s state of peace spirals downward, we struggle to understand why this is happening. We see our universities working for profit and no longer bothering with the “non-profitable” humanities, our true common wealth. We see our students, many knee-deep in college debt, lining up for whatever work might be available. We see families with each parent needing an income while they try hard to recalculate their children’s futures. We see our elderly confused as to what has happened to the world they were once so sure of. And we see our very young looking up with the purity of hope still shining in their eyes. Exhausted and anxious, how is it that we sleep?
And in this milieu of a busy, stressed and increasingly neurotic world, does anyone have the time or the interest to seriously consider the latest, highly enhanced, developments in nuclear weaponry? “Improvements” that make ever smaller bombs much easier to deploy, to use, to copy and to steal.
What can be done to draw public attention back to the ultimate immorality of nuclear war? How do we extricate ourselves from this cloud of unknowing and face the starkest reality of our time? Where do we find the moral courage to once again come face to face with the demons that humanity has created for its own destruction? Who will testify for the unthinkable horror that might someday, by anger, method, quick reaction or mistake, be spread wide across our yet innocent and highly vulnerable planet?
Who has had the experience of living through an atomic hell on earth and has survived until now to tell about it?
Only those who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and who have subsequently passed this knowledge on to their descendants and those who have heard them speak. What would be the most appropriate way to honor their collective 70-year mission of peace and hope to a world lost in today’s rush towards continual consumption and potential total annihilation?
One way may be by creating a respectful Hiroshima-Nagasaki International Memorial in an appropriate international location to all the victims (known as Hibakusha, which include non-Japanese) and their descendants, and to do it with small individual amounts of public funding. In this way, world citizens from all walks of life might once again have the courage to face what the survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no choice but to face. Since many of the first generation Hibakusha are elderly and will soon be gone, and with their passing we will be left without their testimony, now is the time to honor them by preserving their 70-year legacy.
Peoples of all nations might then be better able to remember the horrors of our collective past while reconceiving the possibility of living in a world free of nuclear weapons. For once the future is reconceived, a better world may perhaps be born.
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Transcend Media Service
