Good morning, Netizens...

There is a macabre quality to a remembrance of the bombing of Hiroshima 65 years ago yesterday. There have been other catastrophes since 1945 equal to or exceeding the number of people who were killed either at the time the bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay or since that time. Like Veterans of Foreign Wars, the number of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are slowly diminishing over the years, so there are fewer and fewer left who remember the horror of two days in December in the first person, yet they live with the memories.

The Hibakusha, those Japanese who still bear the keloidal and other burn scars from their exposure to the atomic blasts, still are around, even here in Spokane.

“Tears and sweat bring out the best in us...” (Mr. Rogers, interview 2002)

“Today and always I remember them, those in Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th, as well as those in Los Alamos and Tinian that day. As a child I feared nothing more than a nuclear attack, the unendurable death from a single plane. I hope our children will have less, and not more, to fear. I hope the atom bomb can retire and that 65 more years, and 650 more years, and 6,500 more years, will pass before another city is destroyed by a single bomb. I think of those in Hiroshima on August 6th and every day.” (Lucy Walker, Huffington Post, 2010)

I have written extensively, some might suggest, about the potential impacts of an atomic bomb exploding near Spokane. Some might consider this repetitive action vulgar or perhaps even compulsive, but what it has become is more liken to a silent prayer that I never live to see such an event take place, that my children and their children will pick up the gauntlet and like myself, do everything within their power to prohibit nuclear weapons before it is too late.

That is why every August 6^th I remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki with its legion of invisible victims.

Please feel free to join me in my reverie.

Dave

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