Names of the lost are calling (Lessons of Hiroshima falling on deaf ears)

[marmar]

Names of those lost are calling
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2006-08-06 04:20. Media
By Ed Kociela

They call them the Hibakusha. They are the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Sunday in Hiroshima, they will read the names of the 200,000 Hibakusha who died 61 years ago from the initial blast that leveled 80 percent of the city, as well as the 45,000 or so who have since died from its after-effects.

Tuesday in Nagasaki they will read the names of the 137,339 Hibakusha in remembrance of what happened there 61 years ago.

In between, on Monday, the mayor of Hiroshima will give his annual speech called "The Peace Declaration."

But, will anybody be listening?

I hope they are in Israel, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Africa, in Washington, D.C., in every world center. I hope every human heart gets the message that we don't need another Hiroshima, another Nagasaki or any more Hibakusha. Not here, not there, not anywhere.

Peace is in all of our hearts I think, I hope. And, that road to peace does not have to be lined with the blood of the innocents who always suffer most or the threat of bombs that would assure our mutual destruction.

All too often I hear, "I just don't understand those people who are willing to blow themselves up like that."

Maybe, just maybe, if we tried to understand them or their cause, there wouldn't be a need for car bombs, vest bombs, suicide attacks. And, maybe, just maybe, if we tried to understand each other, explore our different value systems and come to grips with the idea that whether it's Allah, oil or God we're fighting for, we are expending our most precious gift - human life.

I don't like the idea of killing off all the al Qaeda, all the Hamas, all the Hezbollah because it perpetrates The Crusades, embittering people with whom there already is enough enmity and feeding the kill-or-be-killed mentality.

This planet is warming, we're running out of space in many parts of it. We're running out of the fuels that sustain our lives - whether Islamic, Christian or non-believer. Beyond our creed and color, we're pretty much all the same. Still, the so-called uniters have become dividers; the deciders are, at this moment, indecisive; the compassionate have compromised their hearts; as the world turns and burns.

We're being beaten over the head with "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists," which is ridiculous. It's time to turn the tables and explain instead that you're either with humanity and peaceful coexistence or you're against it.

Embracing peace is a strength, not a weakness.

"You can call me a dreamer.

Well, I'm not the only one," John Lennon sang.

No more bombs.

No more war.

No more Hibakusha.

Please.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/13580

[annabanana]

1. an unremarked anniversary...

This day may come and go unnoticed in the mainstream media, but in some churches, at least, it is remembered. This was the sermon that Father Tony Jewess gave today at St. James Episcopal Church in Long Beach NY. (with his permission):

Transfiguration Day
August 6th, 2006


As I must have certainly mentioned more than once, I like to go to Japan. Next month I will be going again and it will be my fifth visit there.
On my second visit I went to Hiroshima – I wanted to go to the Peace Park there.
The Bullet Train – called the Shinkansen – let us off at Hiroshima Station,
and we found ourselves in a very modern and bustling Japanese city.
I don’t remember thinking that there were fewer than normal signs of antiquity –
those signs are often not very evident in the middle of towns and cities –
you have to travel outside or go into the back streets to find them.
But on approaching the Peace Park a striking site appears on the horizon – a building, severely damaged but still standing – the shape of its dome still outlined by the original construction guiders, but otherwise an open sided hulk.
This building was the sole structure left standing after the detonation of the Atomic Bomb directly overhead,
which destroyed everything and everyone and every living creature on the surface of the ground for four miles in every direction.
That was just the beginning for me.
Whether or not you believe that the use of this force was necessary – whether or not you either understand or sympathize with the culture ordering the lives of the Japanese at that time in their history –
a visit to the Peace Park Museum will change your life forever.
I stood in front of one of the exhibits inside –
it was the detonation instrument.
The little device was deceptively simple –
two chambers, separated by a film of fragile material.
On each side of the film were the two elements –
Uranium on the one side, Plutonium on the other.
A mechanical timing device was set to break the film at about 1500 feet above the ground
and when this happened, the process known as nuclear fission began.
I read the little card explaining the process carefully.
Then the card instructed me to step back and look up.

There, above my head, the bomb itself, painted black, with the fins we associate with conventional bombs –
only about five feet long with a diameter of about two feet.
Most of the interior was filled with electronics,
crude by our standards,
that had to do with the timing of detonation, and cushioning material to reduce the risk of accidental discharge on the plane. The deadly elements occupied a space about the size of a teacup.
The exhibits, the pictures, the recorded voices of the pilots of the delivery plane –
all are profoundly disturbing.
At one point I had to go outside and get some fresh air,
before forcing myself back to complete the journey around the museum.
Japanese boys and girls come from all over the country to see the Peace Park.
Afterwards, they sit at tables and make origami Cranes –
the Crane being the symbol of peace in Japan –
which they leave as mementos of their time there.
Many are in tears as they carefully fold the paper into the little birds
which they place carefully in the memorial garden.

I have been back to Hiroshima three more times,
but not to go to the Peace Park any more.
Hiroshima is how you get to the ferry boat which takes you to Miyajima Island,
and I have made it a point to revisit the island every time I go back to Japan.
Miyajima is a sacred island – you know it because of the large Tori gate which sits in the water at the entrance to the harbor,
through which you can see the largest temple,
which seems to be floating in the water too.
It is one of the most photographed scenes in all of Japan
and finds its way onto calendars and postcards, and is invariably included on travel films about Japan.
I can never resist taking yet another picture of it.

Most visitors and pilgrims to Miyajima come for the day,
and it is always crowded.
Small deer captivate the hearts of everyone,
and nuzzle their pockets and handbags hoping to find treats there. These deer are the messengers of the deities and must be treated with respect.
When you go to one of the little shrines you first wash your hands and then clap twice.
This summons the deity of that place, and invariably summons a deer as well.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to somehow see that the system works quite well,
especially if you have sugar cube or two in your possession.

Miyajima was far enough away from the detonation of “Little Boy” as the bomb was called to be unharmed,
but of course the radiation killed many of the residents and monks there at the time.

I always stay on the island – and after the last boat has departed, a great peace settles on the place, as night falls.
The lights of the city of Hiroshima across the bay seem very far away.

Sometimes I go to watch the monks raking the sand in elegant straight lines or in elaborate patterns,
and then sit to the side as they gather for their prayers.
Gongs softly resonate,
drums are gently beaten, sticks clatter together
and the chanting includes a lot of glottal sounds, clicks and tonal calls.
All very strange to our ears – until, walking home in the near darkness,
you hear those same sounds coming from the trees and bushes,
as birds and small animals settle themselves for the night.

It is sixty one years ago today that the bomb was detonated above the city of Hiroshima
and the voices of seventy thousand people were instantly silenced, and the voices of uncounted birds and animals silenced too.

And because August 6th happens to fall on a Sunday this year,
it is on this day that we contemplate the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ.

What does that word mean, or what can it mean?

Among the more obvious dictionary definitions we find that it means “sudden emanations” –
and the gospels tell us of a blinding white light which caused the witnesses to fall to the ground.


In this case, the blinding white light was not the searing white light of the nuclear event
which robbed the blue sky of its color
and created a lunar landscape incapable of sustaining life for many years,
but the light revealing the man Christ for who he really was,
the light of the world.

As I thought about ways to merge the Hiroshima memorial,
as an event which changed the world in our own time,
and the Transfiguration
as an event which changed the world in times far removed from our own,
I really began to see terrific tensions –
between creation and destruction,
between intense lightness and extreme darkness,
between ultimate wrong and complete reconciliation,
between total power and abject powerlessness,
between impressive strength and pitiful weakness,
between excessive riches and crushing poverty.



And it continues –
the tension between two cultures, both of great passion and historical antipathy,
the tension between tribes, the root causes for their differences long lost in the history of struggle and killing,
the tensions between faiths, among branches of the same faith, the murderous tensions between Sufis and Shias for instance.

Even tensions within.

I was profoundly disappointed to learn this week that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh has scheduled its Diocesan Convention for the same weekend that the new Presiding Bishop will be installed in Washington.
Of all the mean-spirited gestures for a Diocese whose Bishop has populated his diocese with clergy of like mind,
who has expelled differing voices
and where only folk as narrow minded and ignorant as he is can remain and prosper.
A bishop who thinks this is the way to express disapproval at the election of a woman as Presiding Bishop.

It is shameful, but fortunately, it is also isolated.
The very tensions I’m speaking about would spell the collective end of everything worthwhile
were it not for the real fact that we are at a stage in our evolutionary history when we can actually name these things –
and some people at least can actually understand them.

The Commandments are still the benchmark of modern law,
and although some of us think that we have too many laws and too many rules,
the essential basics of order and behavior are rooted, almost universally in the world,
on the ancient instructions of God to our distant ancestors –
the same ancestors shared by our Islamic cousins as well.

It is also a mistake to be discouraged by all the tensions of the present, without at least acknowledging those of the past.

The plotting and outrageous misuse of power by the Borgia Popes, for instance,
the quest for heirs which blinded the English kings to any sense of justice for the common man,
the history of slavery which we find so easy to overlook as a thing of the past, the legacy of which, though, colors so much of our community life even now,
the holocaust
and the almost demonic powers represented by men like Hitler and Stalin.

I am reading a new biography about Wallis Simpson and her life as Duchess of Windsor.
The excesses of the Windsor’s lives,
the dabbling in politics,
the duplicity,
the total disregard for ordinary people and their very lives,
and the window the book opens to the politics and intrigues of the times,
make us want to be cautiously optimistic that things are not as bad now as they seem at first.

But it might be misplaced optimism.




UNICEF released a statement on Friday with chilling statistics –
A Lebanese child is being killed every three hours
40% of the 750 civilians killed in Lebanon are children
25% of the entire population has been rendered homeless
23 tons of bombs are bring dropped every day – or 3 per minute
55 bridges have been destroyed
All airports are out of operation
All seaports are out of operation
Only 15% of power is operational
Almost 70,000 people have been evacuated
189 countries are calling for a cease fire – but ours is not one of them!

The Israeli Minister of Defense made the following statement, and I think it is the most significant I’ve heard,
he said –
“The Mid East is not the Mid West. Here, only the strong survive. The weak must be made to disappear”.

Do you hear any ambiguity in that statement?
Do you hear words of compromise, of reconciliation, of brotherhood between Semites, of tolerance,
of recognition of a commonly shared God?
I hear only words which resonate of annihilation,
of the creating of another lunar landscape,
of the killing of every living thing so that no vestige remains.
Like Ozymandias, King of Kings, their memory is nothing but a disturbance in the sand.
“The weak must be made to disappear”.
Those words were uttered just a few miles away from the place where Jesus was revealed in blinding array
to those select followers –
and where the voice of God thundered from the brilliance,
telling us to heed his voice.

The Israeli Minister for Defense is deluded!
The weak can never be made to disappear,
for Jesus reminds us often that the real power is vested in the weak. The power to overcome the festering lust for domination which this man represents
rests only in those who are peacemakers.
The weakness which he despises and seeks to destroy,
like a bloodthirsty hound,
is actually the hope of the world.


The qualities of the weak will be thriving when he is dead and gone –
only his murderous words remaining as a legacy.
Nobody will remember his name.

We are weak –
a small congregation struggling to understand global issues
and it is natural that we say to ourselves “what on earth can I do – even as a community, what can we do”.

Not much is of course the answer.
Oh yes, we can relay our thoughts and feelings to our friends –
we can speak up and be informed if the occasions should present itself,
at voting time we can cast our lot for someone with integrity,
we can pray too.
One of the weapons of the weak is prayer –
let’s not forget to use it.

And we can demonstrate survival.

Where that lunar landscape was created sixty one years ago, a thriving city now stands.
The weak survived and now prosper.
Lessons were learned and Hiroshima stands as a reminder of the appalling effects of using terrible power –
but also as a defiant testament that the weak can return,
rebuild, repent perhaps, and ultimately replenish.

Ordinary humans in ordinary communities have always been undervalued by the mighty.
But it is in the survival of ordinary humans in ordinary communities
that we see a continuing demonstration of the more common dictionary definition of Transfiguration –
to change appearance in a brilliant and new way.

Despite all the forces of power and evil in the world,
do not lose sight of the fact that there has always been,
and always will be, a parallel force of power and good. Figuratively, there is always a sacred island across the bay from the scene of the worst strife,
and optimism is never misplaced.
The emanations from exploding bombs are sooner or later eclipsed by the light emanating from good people all over the world.
It is through them that transfiguration continues to happen.

(nominated)