Yesterday marked the 63rd anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. My mother is on a plane returning from Japan. She'd been invited to speak at several events spanning two weeks, primarily through the 2008 World Conference against A and H Bombs and as a guest of the New Japan Women's Association.
My mother has been a dedicated peace activist for her entire adult life. She has become well known in anti-war circles over the past four years since she lost her son, my brother, Sgt. Sherwood Baker. Sher was an Army National Guardsman sent to Iraq to search for WMD. He died in the effort.
Poetic and painful, her witness in Japan has also revealed an instance of unimaginable idiocy from a US ambassador speaking on behalf of our great nation.
My mother has been sending us e-mail updates, insights and meditations on her experiences.
The place where the bomb went off, their ground zero, is now a huge peace park, with monuments and memorials and a domed building that somehow withstood the blast , the shell of it still remains standing and is an iconic building here, some of the delegates from Osaka are here and took me for a walk through the area. the actual epicenter is now a doctors office. The city it self burned for 3 days, so there was nothing left except some concrete walls and ironically the bridge that was the target
We seem to forget that horror, the obliteration of a city, and what war does to generations.
I went to the museum by myself - wandering through the nightmare displays, seeing the charred lunch boxes and shoes, the hideous pictures of skin melting off children, blackened fingernails that mothers saved from their children's bodies- i was reminded of what Oppenheimer said when he saw the bomb explode =now we are death- i stayed there alone till the museum closed and then walked around the park which is where the houses stood, where people lived ordinary lives in frightening times, and so many young people were in the City that week, working out doors- whole schools of young teenagers were working that morning. in one instant they were extinct. The area is surrounded by two rivers and bridges, more narrow than the river at 30th street, - after the bomb hit those who still lived went to the rivers and jumped in to cool themselves, the river filled with bodies. i sat on a bench there as the sun set listening to ghosts.
Beyond politics, beyond historical analysis, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a mark on our collective humanity. But that mark is ultimately defined by the victims. That's why this part of my mother's e-mail was jaw dropping.
the American ambassador addressing some students this week said it was a good decision to drop both bombs.
Could you imagine a more inappropriate time and place for such comments from a US ambassador? Is this reflective of a more pervasive and contemporary ignorance of suffering and pain from those who happen to not be American?
Here is what followed:
Some of the delegates were so upset they went and had a demonstration at the peace park, i went too, and soon heard my name being called to speak- i could only say that it made me sad that the ambassador chose this place and this week to make his statement and that it is only in telling the truth, facing responsibility on all sides that we ever reach reconciliation.
The people of Hiroshima are bearers of one of the worst legacies our history has to offer. They ought to be listened to and learned from. Continued contempt for a world view of equal and shared suffering, for universal sympathy, only feeds the wars and subsequent atrocities we so strongly oppose.
God forgive us...