No Nukes

At seven p.m. tonite, August 5, I will stop for a minutes silence to remember the Hiroshima victims. It is sad when a nation goes to war and goes to extreme measures to stop death by killing many others. There is the horror of war, the horrible disfigured bloody half dead, the black smoke, the carnage of broken buildings glass and incredible silence of death.

Who are we to continue to think we can do this to each other? This war on terror can only be but one step towards another Hiroshima, when will we nuke another nation to save our own skins? How far are we willing to go to protect the rights of our sanctity of life by taking away the sanctity of life of others?

I remember being a young boy and for one year in 1965 in class, we practiced only once the drill of jumping under our desks in class to protect ourselves from a nuclear attack. I remember seeing the film on Hiroshima and thinking I would rather stand tall and be vaporized instead of crawling around asking for water, and slowly dieing the radioactive death.

It is sad to think today just because the Berlin Wall came down that we no longer face this horrible truth. The truth of nations who are willing to take away civil liberties, of enacting acts of war as nation states and justifying the bombing of innocent civilians to fight "terrorist".

We are no further away from this nuclear threat in fact, by taking away the stalemate, all we have done is come one second closer to an accidential nuclear holocaust, one nation bombing another and then seeing it escalate.

Of course there is the politically correct way of saying that the cold war is over, actually it never ended really. All that happened was that the Soviet dictator was replaced by a semi-dictator, who never stood down the nuclear silos, and the American military never reprogrammed or shut down their nuclear silos, the two are still facing each other.

Perhaps there will be a limited nuclear war, which will cost generations upon generations of death, 25 thousand years of contamination, and for what? For a political ideal? What is so free about being unable to travel the land that is contaminated with radiation? What is so communist about exterminating millions of innocents? What is so American about taking away the very freedom that it holds dear?

All we can hope for today is to hope that perhaps after a while, that eventually those in power will learn that you cannot fight death with death, you can fight death with life, with love, with hope, just like the victims of Hiroshima.