by Karen Topakian
That’s what I saw when I exited the bus at 7th and Market the other day. Small gnawed bones. Picked clean of meat. Not yet brittle. Looking very new. The memory of those bird remnants haunted me for days until today, when they made complete sense.
Why today?
Because today is August 6th. And 63 years ago today, in 1945, Hiroshima was transformed into a landscape of charred bodies, human shadows burned into the sidewalk and bones. 140,000 died that day and afterwards.
Most people wouldn’t even notice the bones at the bus stop or care that they belonged to a chicken. But the bones in Japan represented human life that was lost in the flash of a moment, in a war we are supposed to remember as great, worth fighting, noble. They were the bones of children, mothers, grandparents.
The US government dropped that atomic bomb to convince the Japanese government to surrender unconditionally. An end to the war with Japan did come, a few days later, after we dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Leaving the bones and charred remains of 80,000 on their streets, and in their homes and schools and places of business.
On that day the US government let the genie out of the nuclear bottle in a big, brash, destructive, violent way. And it hasn’t gone back in. Try as many of us have to jam it back in. We just haven’t been able to succeed.
Currently, eight countries possess more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. And Agape has spent its resources over the years funding organizations that worked to reduce that number to zero. Organizations like Western States Legal Foundation that monitors and analyzes U.S. nuclear weapons programs. And Women for Genuine Security that promotes a world of genuine security based on justice and respect for others. And War Resisters League that opposes all war.
In some cultures, the bones of saints are revered, referred to as relics, stored in small boxes, treasured, protected. We imagine the human flesh that surrounded them and the heart that once beat inside them. We know that within all of us lie these same bones. And yet in war, we crush them with our bombs and run over them with our tanks and blow them apart with our bullets.
Sadly, the bones of war continue to pile up. But there is something quite different about the ones that covered the city of Hiroshima on that summer day. They were the victims of the nuclear age.
Just as President Roosevelt declared Dec 7, 1941, as a day that would go down in infamy, so should this day, August 6th, 1945.
Tags: Add new tag, nuclear disarmament