The Great Shame

75 Years After the Big Bomb

Yesterday seventy-five years ago the world changed for the worse when we – us the “good guys” — dropped an atom bomb on 340,000 people in Hiroshima.  Within the next couple of months 140,000 of them died.  70,000 immediately in the blast, the rest in agony from injuries and radiation poison.  A few thousand were soldiers. The rest were civilians. Almost all civilians.

We should not have done that.  Never.  It was a despicable act that stains us in the same way that our hidden histories of racism and genocide have made this culture of embedded entitlement and legal greed what it is.

The atomic age we ushered in has, in my mind, shifted the implicate order of our universe in ways we do not ourselves understand, but that we must now live through and learn from.  It’s our lot as human meaning-makers. 

If it required horrors of this magnitude to reveal the inherent evil of the authoritarian system, it behooves us to face the evil directly and take it in fully so we can move on to the fullness of the humanity we are truly called to. 

Let’s not dawdle.  Let’s do it.  Let’s become one humanity on one lovely and radiant planet, living in harmonic convergence with each other in ways that our hearts know we need.  This is the time, and this our still- beautiful home planet is the place. 

That does not mean we pretend none of these things happened.  We must acknowledge the things that this system engendered, grieve and rage the harms done, and make amends in the best ways we can find.  There are no easy solutions.

But this pain can be a healing pain after a difficult surgery.  Nobody goes to the operating room without expecting pain.  Right now we’re laying helpless on a gurney at the operating room door, and trying to trust that when we awake from surgery things will start to get better.  Trust isn’t something this culture encourages, so of course this is a very uncertain moment.  Re-opening our hearts to trust in those different from ourselves will be an act of faith beyond our lived experience. The surgeons we need most will have different colored skins and speak strange languages.  But the act of re-weaving the terribly torn webs of life is what can save us.  Webs of caring relationship and community across boundaries of fear are what we need. Not something we can avoid to our profit. 

This Sunday is another terrible milestone.  Seventy-five years since the Japanese city of Nagasaki was bombed on August 9 at two minutes past 11:00 am.  Another 70,000 souls died in agony from that event.

If you can, please pause in your day and send generous prayers and thoughts to those martyrs of war and let your heart shift to hopes for all of us as we carry the weight of our violent and greedy past into a new order that can be a blessing not a curse to the fullness of our humanity.

Here is a link to Little Rock’s virtual honor to the 75^th anniversary.  Thank you, Arkansas Coalition for Peace and Justice, and other great Arkansas groups for producing this tribute.

Watch the event online at: https://www.facebook.com/pg/acpj.acpj/videos/

As wise Omni folk, we want to Inform  ourselves better.  Here’s a page from PeaceWins: Alternatives to Conflict, linking to many interesting peace and nonviolence resources and events of the day:

PeaceWins