Aug. 6 marks a terrible anniversary: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiro-shima.
The annual commemorative rites will take place at Green Lake's northwest shore on Saturday, starting at 7 p.m. with a musical program. The chillingly beautiful lantern-floating ceremony follows at 9 p.m.
Woe to us if we ever forget.
But shame on us, too, if we don't remember that life is complex.
Humanity, then humility
For starters, I probably wouldn't be here if the bomb hadn't been dropped.
My dad, after fighting his way from the Rhone to the Rhine, where he was wounded, had recovered enough in that summer of 1945 to be propped up, ready for action.
He later learned that he had been poised to wade ashore with the first wave onto mainland Japan. Kind of like Keats coughing up blood: Those orders were his death warrant.
I don't wake up every morning thankful for the bomb - hardly. That's way too abstract, though in 1945, there were hundreds of thousands of GIs and their families who were grateful for the catastrophic end to a war they did not start.
But the knowledge of how I got here makes me pause before a life chain of contingencies that stretch beyond understanding. Those frail contingencies - and we all have our own - form our humanity.
And they should guarantee our humility.
Remembering all war victims
The Saturday ceremonies will remember the victims of all wars, not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Mourners' thoughts would do well to include the rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, the Korean "comfort women" and Pearl Harbor. Along with Dresden and Coventry, Rwanda and Bosnia. And the largely forgotten civilian dead of Iraq.
The list is endless.
If we have an urgent moral duty, it is to see the world clearly and whole. It's too easy to be against war and just leave it at that. But that's a perspective too much of the American and Seattle Left just can't get with.
Too often, peace marches are platforms for mere self-expression. Sometimes they shade over into self-gratifying, moral exhibitionism. Their utility, as a result, can be extremely self-limiting.
The American Left couldn't unseat an ignoramus president who looked the nation in the eye and played footsies with the truth to sell an obscene war. That kind of political impotence should cause some heavy soul-searching.
Seattle's stand
In Seattle we've canonized the late Hazel Wolf, an energetic, committed activist who did much for the environment. And yet, in her memoirs, she refers to Britain's "invasion" of France as British troops rushed to repel Hitler's very real invasion of that country in World War II. No one hereabouts blinks at such goofy, ideological tripe because it came from St. Hazel.
Lenin stands proudly in Fremont. No one blinks. That's cool. Unless you're totally ignorant of Lenin's role in history.
As a country, we are more in tune with Nixon's sins than Lenin's, or those of his far-worse successor, Joseph Stalin. That's not to discount Nixon's sins.
But woe to us if we forget the others'. We don't want to see the whole picture.
We Americans are expert at shoving people and things out of the way - bear, salmon, Indians - and then weeping pleasurable, crocodile tears of remorse long after the troublemakers are gone. It's a cottage industry. It's what land speculators call "win-win."
And so we turn on the lights and curse the dams. The Saab with the "Free Tibet" bumpersticker cuts us off in traffic.
There are vegetarians with carnivorous teeth among us.
What really matters is where we would have stood on the "slavery issue" in 1860, or the "Indian Question" in 1876, or "Kristallnacht" in 1938, or the Japanese-American "relocation" in 1942
Or Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Proper respect for the dead
Mercifully, most of us will never need to look deep into ourselves in the extreme crunch.
As the fragile lanterns are set afloat on the waters of Green Lake in the Aug. 6 gloaming, we would do well to honor the memories of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all wars with respect and awe for life's complexities.
And we'd do well to understand that most of the remembering is being done from the figurative bleachers. That's just being honest with ourselves, which is the first step toward showing proper respect for the dead.
Mike Dillon, publisher of the Herald-Outlook can be reached at mdillon@ nwlink.com.
[[In-content Ad]]
