Hiroshima Day
Hiroshima Day Commemorative Rally
Saturday, Aug. 6th, 9 to 11 AM
Join the Tucson Peace Action Coalition and other local Peace and Justice organizations at Davis-Monthan AFB Main Gate, Craycroft Rd. at Golflinks (Bus Rt. 34)
What better than to post a notice on a blog that nobody reads because I never update it and haven't told anyone about it yet? But if you're one of the lucky ones who happen by, come and join us all on Saturday. Invited to be one of the speakers, I'll probably be saying something like this:
We gather together today to remember the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We gather today to remember, not through some hazy lens of history that allows us to shed crocodile tears for the “collateral damage” of a military triumph, but to remember, as best we can, the individuals who suffered so tragically in this event. The words of one survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, recorded in a 1980 Atlantic Magazine article, bring the horror of these events home.
Listen:
Was it the flash that came first, or the sound of the explosion, tearing up my insides? I don't remember. I was thrown to the ground, pinned to the earth, and immediately the world began to collapse around me, on my head, my shoulders. I couldn't see anything. It was completely dark. I thought my last hour had come. I thought of my three children, who had been evacuated to the country to be safe from the raids. I couldn't move; debris kept falling, beams and tiles piled up on top of me.
Finally I did manage to crawl free. There was a terrible smell in the air. Thinking the bomb that hit us might have been a yellow phosphorus incendiary like those that had fallen on so many other cities, I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a [towel] I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove.
One little section of one story of one survivor, one among countless stories, and multiply that by all those who died, whose stories will never be told, stories so brutal and grotesque that we want to turn away, to close our eyes to the images, close our ears to the description of horror.
But we are here because we have decided not to turn away, not to close our eyes or stop our ears from hearing. We are here because we refuse to look away from the horror that is wrought by humanity’s insistence on war as a solution. And we are committed to finding a better way, for ourselves and for our country.
Rev. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, recalls his trip to Japan in 2003:
While I was [there], I took a day to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park, the memorial to the 250,000 Japanese who were killed when we dropped a weapon of mass destruction on that city. And at a wonderful dinner at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine after our ritual Misogi cleansing, I finally found the question I needed to ask our Japanese hosts.
"How could you possibly have forgiven us for our use of the atomic bomb?” A member of the Grand Shrine Board, a retired nuclear physicist named Mr. Feruda, responded...He said: “Despite the horrific death toll and the devastation, we actually have come to see our loss as a blessing. You see, if we had not lost that war, the military government would probably still be in power and we would still be out colonizing and appropriating resources to fuel our industrial machine. If we had not lost, the attitude of arrogance that was a part of Japanese life during those times would still be with us, the belief that because we had the might, we had the right to do as we willed.”
"You see,” he said, “ if we had not lost… we would have become you. We would have become you and it would have crippled the soul of our nation."
And we are here asking: what is it that we have become?
We recall the terrible face of destruction through the words of one survivor so that we may honor the dignity of every individual who perished, and we honor them by taking action against the continued development and use of nuclear weapons in any form; by taking action against a foreign policy that relies on death and destruction to bring freedom; by taking action to promote a new Federal Budget that reflects informed compassion rather than twisted intelligence; one that is directed by human need rather than oil addiction; one that seeks to provide food and healthcare for the poor, rather than tax loopholes for the wealthy.
Time Magazine reports that the Bush Administration is determined not just to modernize its aging arsenal of nuclear weapons, but to develop a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator—known as the “bunker buster”—which would be used to blast targets buried deep underground…this, while we try to prevent others from having nuclear weapons, and encourage other countries to aid us in this endeavor of policing the world.
We are done with that twisted logic. We are tired of business as usual. We don’t believe in the solutions being offered. The distorted reasoning is being exposed daily: we wage war to end war; we wage war to make people safe where the war is not being waged; we wage war to win peace; we wage war to avoid the war that would have come if we had not waged the war that we waged…and it would all be just amusingly confounding, something to make us scratch our heads and roll our eyes, but for the cost! Hiroshima and Nagasaki remind us of the cost. Viet Nam reminds us of the cost. Afghanistan reminds us of the cost. Iraq reminds us of the cost.
We lift our voices today—remembering those who suffered and died 60 years ago—we lift our voices to say that we don’t want to study war no more. We don’t believe in winning wars. We don’t believe in winning peace through war. We don’t believe in winning peace at all, because peace is not a prize, it is a prayer. It is a prayer and a promise.
Whatever your faith, whatever your religious or philosophical background, whether the spirit of life and love makes itself known to you through Gods or Goddesses, whether it shows its face in artistic expression or the natural world, whether it touches you through meditation or church services or political action or the everyday miracle of human compassion, join with me now in a spirit of prayer as I share these words of Thich Nhat Hanh:
Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion—towards ourselves and towards all living beings. Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other. With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.
Amen.
That’s the prayer. And here’s the promise. We promise each other that we will do all that is in our power to make that prayer live, in our own lives, in our communities, and in the world. I can think of no better way to honor those who we remember today.
Keep your eyes and ears open, today and every day. Keep your hearts strong. Keep working for peace.
Saturday, Aug. 6th, 9 to 11 AM
Join the Tucson Peace Action Coalition and other local Peace and Justice organizations at Davis-Monthan AFB Main Gate, Craycroft Rd. at Golflinks (Bus Rt. 34)
What better than to post a notice on a blog that nobody reads because I never update it and haven't told anyone about it yet? But if you're one of the lucky ones who happen by, come and join us all on Saturday. Invited to be one of the speakers, I'll probably be saying something like this:
We gather together today to remember the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We gather today to remember, not through some hazy lens of history that allows us to shed crocodile tears for the “collateral damage” of a military triumph, but to remember, as best we can, the individuals who suffered so tragically in this event. The words of one survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, recorded in a 1980 Atlantic Magazine article, bring the horror of these events home.
Listen:
Was it the flash that came first, or the sound of the explosion, tearing up my insides? I don't remember. I was thrown to the ground, pinned to the earth, and immediately the world began to collapse around me, on my head, my shoulders. I couldn't see anything. It was completely dark. I thought my last hour had come. I thought of my three children, who had been evacuated to the country to be safe from the raids. I couldn't move; debris kept falling, beams and tiles piled up on top of me.
Finally I did manage to crawl free. There was a terrible smell in the air. Thinking the bomb that hit us might have been a yellow phosphorus incendiary like those that had fallen on so many other cities, I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a [towel] I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove.
One little section of one story of one survivor, one among countless stories, and multiply that by all those who died, whose stories will never be told, stories so brutal and grotesque that we want to turn away, to close our eyes to the images, close our ears to the description of horror.
But we are here because we have decided not to turn away, not to close our eyes or stop our ears from hearing. We are here because we refuse to look away from the horror that is wrought by humanity’s insistence on war as a solution. And we are committed to finding a better way, for ourselves and for our country.
Rev. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, recalls his trip to Japan in 2003:
While I was [there], I took a day to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park, the memorial to the 250,000 Japanese who were killed when we dropped a weapon of mass destruction on that city. And at a wonderful dinner at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine after our ritual Misogi cleansing, I finally found the question I needed to ask our Japanese hosts.
"How could you possibly have forgiven us for our use of the atomic bomb?” A member of the Grand Shrine Board, a retired nuclear physicist named Mr. Feruda, responded...He said: “Despite the horrific death toll and the devastation, we actually have come to see our loss as a blessing. You see, if we had not lost that war, the military government would probably still be in power and we would still be out colonizing and appropriating resources to fuel our industrial machine. If we had not lost, the attitude of arrogance that was a part of Japanese life during those times would still be with us, the belief that because we had the might, we had the right to do as we willed.”
"You see,” he said, “ if we had not lost… we would have become you. We would have become you and it would have crippled the soul of our nation."
And we are here asking: what is it that we have become?
We recall the terrible face of destruction through the words of one survivor so that we may honor the dignity of every individual who perished, and we honor them by taking action against the continued development and use of nuclear weapons in any form; by taking action against a foreign policy that relies on death and destruction to bring freedom; by taking action to promote a new Federal Budget that reflects informed compassion rather than twisted intelligence; one that is directed by human need rather than oil addiction; one that seeks to provide food and healthcare for the poor, rather than tax loopholes for the wealthy.
Time Magazine reports that the Bush Administration is determined not just to modernize its aging arsenal of nuclear weapons, but to develop a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator—known as the “bunker buster”—which would be used to blast targets buried deep underground…this, while we try to prevent others from having nuclear weapons, and encourage other countries to aid us in this endeavor of policing the world.
We are done with that twisted logic. We are tired of business as usual. We don’t believe in the solutions being offered. The distorted reasoning is being exposed daily: we wage war to end war; we wage war to make people safe where the war is not being waged; we wage war to win peace; we wage war to avoid the war that would have come if we had not waged the war that we waged…and it would all be just amusingly confounding, something to make us scratch our heads and roll our eyes, but for the cost! Hiroshima and Nagasaki remind us of the cost. Viet Nam reminds us of the cost. Afghanistan reminds us of the cost. Iraq reminds us of the cost.
We lift our voices today—remembering those who suffered and died 60 years ago—we lift our voices to say that we don’t want to study war no more. We don’t believe in winning wars. We don’t believe in winning peace through war. We don’t believe in winning peace at all, because peace is not a prize, it is a prayer. It is a prayer and a promise.
Whatever your faith, whatever your religious or philosophical background, whether the spirit of life and love makes itself known to you through Gods or Goddesses, whether it shows its face in artistic expression or the natural world, whether it touches you through meditation or church services or political action or the everyday miracle of human compassion, join with me now in a spirit of prayer as I share these words of Thich Nhat Hanh:
Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion—towards ourselves and towards all living beings. Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other. With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.
Amen.
That’s the prayer. And here’s the promise. We promise each other that we will do all that is in our power to make that prayer live, in our own lives, in our communities, and in the world. I can think of no better way to honor those who we remember today.
Keep your eyes and ears open, today and every day. Keep your hearts strong. Keep working for peace.
posted by Rod @ 3:56 PM
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