Dead Girl
“I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread.
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead.
I’m only seven, although I died
In Hiroshima long ago.
I’m seven now as I was then.
When children die, they do not grow.
My hair was scorched by swirling flame.
My eyes grew dim; my eyes grew blind.
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.
I need no fruit, I need no rice.
I need no sweets, nor even bread.
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead.
All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of the world
May live and grow and laugh and play.”
~ Nazim Hikmet ~
~
ten years after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the turkish poet, Hikmet imagined being one of the hundreds of children who died and gives voice to her plea for peace in the poem above and that plea is mirrored in the reflection that follows of a hibakusha’s cry for peace that began as a cry of revenge:
Koko Kondo had a secret mission as a girl: revenge… determined to find the person who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the person that caused the suffering and the terrible burns she saw on the faces of girls at her father’s church and then give them a punch, she got her chance in 1955 as ten-year-old Kondo appeared on an American TV show called “This is Your Life” that featured her father, Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of six survivors profiled in John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima.” Kondo stared in hatred at another guest: Capt. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the bomb… while Kondo, who survived the bombing as an infant, wondered if she would act on her fantasy and punch him, the host asked Lewis how he felt after dropping the bomb… “Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima, all I could think of was, ‘God, what have we done?’” he said. Kondo saw tears well in Lewis’ eyes, and her hatred melted away. “He was not a monster; he was just another human being… I knew that I should hate the war, not him. It’s time we human beings get together and abolish nuclear weapons, We have hope.”
as we take this moment of eternity to re-member the devastation wrought during this week 77 years ago and as we sit on the precipice of the possibility of nuclear annihilation, let us heed the words of another who rued his role in the Manhattan Project:
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. The splitting of the atom has changed everything except the way we think. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” ~ Albert Einstein ~
and towards that resolve, listen now to the call to action of peace activist John Miksad:
It’s time to stop the MAD-ness!
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed 77 years ago this week. The two bombs the United States dropped on those cities killed some 200,000 human beings, most of whom were civilians. Comparing those bombs to the weapons of today is like comparing a colonial era musket to an AR-15. Now we can snuff out the lives of billions with the push of a button. When you consider the other species we’d annihilate, the number of lives lost “mushrooms” into the trillions. The result would be the destruction of a large portion of life on the planet.
MAD= Mutually Assured Destruction, the actual nuclear war planners’ term.
Think of the billions of years of evolutionary work that would be undone.
Think of everything our ancestors created and passed down to us… incinerated.
Think of all the art, literature, music, poetry that humans created through the millennia…up in smoke. The genius of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Beethoven… destroyed.
Think of everything you worked for, planned for, hoped for… gone.
Think of everyone you love wiped from the face of the earth.
All that will remain is death and suffering.
Man, who has killed so much in his brief existence on this planet, will have committed the ultimate crime…omnicide…the murder of all life.
Those “lucky” enough to survive will have to suffer in toxic destruction.
The aftermath of the holocaust will be worse than anything dystopian writers ever imagined.
All as a result of just one fateful decision, one evil act, one miscalculation, one system error, or some confluence of these events.
While all life on earth hangs in the balance, we go about our lives. We’ve normalized something that is abnormal, abhorrent, and insane. We are under continuous threat. We don’t fully understand the psychological harm…the fear and anxiety that we experience at some level of our individual and collective psyches that struggles to grapple with our omnipresent potential destruction. The nuclear Sword of Damocles dangling above our heads while we eat, sleep, work and play.
Our collective fate is in the hands of nine people who control the 13,000 nuclear warheads in the world…these weapons of massive obliteration. Nine fallible and flawed human beings have the means to destroy all life on the planet. Are we really ok with this? Do we trust them with the lives of everyone we know and love? Isn’t it past time for a sanity check?
No one is safe. This war moved beyond the battlefield long ago. The front lines are in every country, in every town and city, in your backyard, and in your children’s and grandchildren’s bedrooms.
Some think of nuclear weapons as a life insurance policy. They think that although we don’t want to use them, they are good to have when we need them. This thinking could not be more wrong. Since these weapons have been in existence, there have been more near misses and close calls than any rational person would be comfortable with. We’ve escaped annihilation by luck!
Scientists concur; we are in extreme danger right now. As long as these weapons of mass destruction exist, the question is not if they will be used, but when, at which point we get perhaps 30 minutes to say our goodbyes. The arms races of today do not make us safe; they put all of us in jeopardy while making weapons manufacturers wealthy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to have real safety and security, health, and well-being. Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans need not be our enemies.
There are only two ways to eliminate an enemy…either destroy him or make him your friend. Given the weapons in question, destroying the enemy assures our own destruction. It’s a murder/suicide pact. That leaves only one option. We have to talk through our differences and convert our enemies into our friends. The time has come to realize this previously unimagined possibility.
All people of all nations are faced with the interrelated threats of pandemics, climate crises, and nuclear annihilation. These existential threats cannot be solved by any one nation. These global threats require global solutions. They force us to adopt a new paradigm. We need dialog, diplomacy, strong democratized international institutions, and an expansive portfolio of verifiable and enforceable de-militarizing international treaties to reduce fear and build trust.
Nuclear weapons are all illegal. There are nine rogue states that continue to threaten all of us with their nuclear weapons…the United States, Russia, China, England, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. The governments of these nations need to be pushed to adopt the new paradigm. They are stuck in the old paradigm of zero-sum games, “might makes right,” and treating the earth as a geopolitical chessboard while fighting over land, resources, or ideology. Martin Luther King was right when he said that we will either learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish together as fools.
We cannot leave all of life on this beautiful planet in the hands of nine people. These people and their governments have chosen either consciously or unconsciously to threaten us all. We, the people, have the power to change that. We just have to exercise it.”
let us all gather in sacred ceremony around the inner fire of our one cosmic heart committing to befriending all the children of the earth and thus co-creating a cosmos of peace founded on justice and guided by love…
