Been a long time since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. Perhaps the macabre aftermath, captured in solemn black and white images, is lost to 21st century Americans.
But the most devastating 20th century explosion on Earth during war timeāthe deafening silence; the obliteration of cities, buildings, houses, schools, hospitals, parks, pets and plants; the instant evaporation of tens of thousands of human beings; the unnatural reconfigured invisible yet present air and water molecules linked to future cancer deaths in and around emasculated terrain on our shared planet; and the emotional annihilation of warmongering by the entire human race immediately after two lightning quick momentsāis why, my dears, the U.S. did away with the confrontational title of a Department of War and consolidated all military branches into the U.S. Department of Defenseādone so to try to comfort everybody the world over left to comprehend and ever so cautiously carry on in the dawn of the Nuclear Age.
See ā¦ we needed God, if at all possible, (if He even listens to us anymore) to forgive us our collective United States of America sin. And at that time, we never ever wanted to use a nuclear bomb again. And therefore we swallowed our sorrow and carried on as the World Leader to ensure no other nation on Earth would dare make the same mistake, repeat the same sin, bear the unbearable reality of living with ourselves for creating and causing the epitome of mass human death and destruction. Because ā¦ it was a sin (and is now our karma). Surely there were other ways to end a war.
There always had been ā¦ before the bomb.
Peace on earth
Sound too much like a peacenik, do I? President Trump, according to his admirers, claims to be one, too. Hates all war, weāre told by those who know him. Yet our history is as soon as WWII ended, we gallivanted all over the world to stop the spread of communism: Korea, Cuba, Indochina, Central and South America, Eastern Europe. We had to think of ourselves as the Good Guys, the God-fearing righteous people compared to our arch Cold War enemy the communists, thought to be godless subhumans devoid of souls. But it is the U.S. which remains the only nation to have dropped the bomb so far.
A quick online check of what was left after our atomic bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would reveal the grotesque images seen by all who read magazines and newspapers in 1945: melted faces and other body parts, missing fingers, clothing tattooed into human flesh, survivors screaming in agony, the unimaginable yet real horror they alone ā¦ felt. And the radiation sickness that lasted months and longer. Perhaps the lucky ones were the 240,000 Japanese who after our bombs exploded their cities to smithereens were āevaporated,ā their bodies and lives instantly wiped off the face of the earth.
We alone were (and still are) responsible for launching that living nightmare.
So ashamed were Americans at that time, a long 80 years ago.
But ā¦ all is fair in love and war.
And the World War in the Pacific needed to end. The story goes that a few countries including Germany were secretly working to create the first atomic bomb. The U.S. military had been testing tiny versions out in Nowhere, New Mexico, watched live by a number of GIs who in their later years would die from direct exposure to the aftermath of this precise and peculiar bomb.
Post war, we as Americans lived in our private twilight zones. Some became anti-war pacifists, society drop-outs, artists, Beatniks, teachers, do-gooders, Peace Corps volunteers, reefer smokers, heroin addicts. A few became devout atheists, even famous authors and newsmen. It must have been hard for some adults living in the early Nuclear Age to deal with the hypocrisy of our Christian nation killing so many people not just with the bombsā explosion but for generations to come with diseases in any new life that tries to enter our planet at Ground Zero. Clearly the death toll by the atomic bombs was overkill.
Yet back home and most impressively, the great majority of Americans carried on: attending college and trade school on the GI Bill, marrying and creating the Baby Boom, owning homes quickly built for suburban life with parks, community swimming pools, backyard cookouts, Christmas gifts, and of course cars. It is a tribute, that era of post-war America, to all who sacrificed to fight in a world gone mad. Those who served our country deserved to live in peace and security for the rest of their lives.
However, with the passing of time, the great healer we are told, the horror inflicted by our atomic bombs in a country on the other side of the world became ā¦ incomprehensible. And in learning to not think about it ever again, we have forgotten what we were and still are today: capable of mass death and destruction and equally capable of never mentioning it again.