On another August 6,
we are jolted into realizing that Mitt Romney wants his finger on the trigger
that 67 years ago took more than a hundred thousand lives in the name of peace.
In Japan, the Mayor of
Hiroshima cites efforts to provide health care for survivors, now almost 80, so
they can continue to bear witness to what human beings can do to one another.
On that day back then, I was
in Germany, one of untold thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade
Japan. All we knew was that a mushroom cloud had ended our dread of going to
the Pacific to storm beaches and fight through cities. For the first time in
years, we could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on our
lives, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.
It was weeks before we learned
the moral price for our relief--that over 200,000 would die from that explosion
in Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki three days later and that our country
would forever bear the burden of being the first to use such weapons of mass
destruction.
Almost two decades later, in
August 1963, I was interviewing John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. "Since
1945," he said, "we have gone into an entirely new period of nuclear
weapons. Most people have no conception of what it all means. A nuclear
exchange lasting sixty minutes would mean over 300 million deaths. We have to
prevent the end of the human race."
As voters consider Barack
Obama and Mitt Romney on this day in August, those memories must be part of the
equation. How much power of life and death will be in the hands of whoever they
choose in November and what kind of judgment, character and human feeling will
he need to make such choices for them in the future?
Update: Even with so much at
stake and more, the latest Gallup Poll shows voters not budging much from their
party-line voting in 2008.
If the planet blows up, those
who are left in the rubble will still have their partisan campaign buttons.
1 comment:
Thanks for this comment. It shows plainly what kind of people we have become and the ways that the many riches of the USA have been wasted by people who seek only more gold and power.
They may ultimately be successful, but the Earth and all its bounty might then be terminally
unfit for human habitation.
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