Wednesday, February 22, 2012

...et pacem appelant

More ghost cities. This time, Hiroshima, 1945.I can't help thinking the same thing the woman in the article muses:
“The thing that affects me most about the photographs is what isn’t there. The absences, like the photograph of the chalk marks of the feet on the bridge. People know what we did at Hiroshima,” she says pensively, “but we just don’t want to think about it.”
We never do. We like to think we make decisions based on "facts" and "reason", that the fact that we are in "control" is a good thing. And don't get me wrong; penicillin, flush toilets, clean food...these ARE all good things.But the default setting for almost all of us - if I do it, if it benefits me in some way, it must be good - is a dangerous foolery, and we would do well to be more suspicious of our own intentions and more skeptical of our rationalizations.Because once you get to the point of standing there on the Aioi Bridge looking into the sun appearing 1,963 feet above your head, there is nothing you can do except become part of the sunrise.

1 comment:

rangeragainstwar said...

Chief,
i constantly marvel at the easy way in which we justify our use of wmd's (the real stuff) and then slap people in jail for life b/c they had 83 grams of home made petn in their shoes or under wear.don't we remember curtis lemay?
it confuses my simple mind.
but how do we justify the Hiro/naga, tokyo firebombing . throw in hamburg, dresden and any other that warms your cold heart ,AND THEN have the balls to condemn the 9-11 event.
please correct me , as i know you would, if i'm wrong.
the rule as i see it is-if we do it it's ok, but if they do it = no go.
ot. thinking of japan-how did we fuck that up.? things started off well. TR even got a Nobel peace prize supporting them v. the Russians.
the cherry blossoms in DC are gifts from the grandparents of the ww2 fire bombing victims.(japan)
how did we get from cherry blossoms to nuclear blossoms ??
btw- i really was pondering this just the other day.
Have you read Hershey's -Hiroshima??
jim