My Moment of Silence for Hiroshima

I can’t put into words what I was feeling riding the BART train to work this morning, when I was listening through my headphones to news about what happened exactly 70 years ago today. The day the United States powers that be (the only country to have used a nuclear weapon, still to date) killed 70,000 people in an instant — and ultimately hundreds of thousands more — by dropping an atomic bomb.

A moment of silence was observed today all across Japan, along with speeches about the need to unequivocally and finally end the inhumanity of nuclear weapons. Today as I was scanning fellow commuters’ faces I was wondering, “Why aren’t we doing that here?”

A couple of people were looking up at me too, most at their phones. Young faces, old faces, parents, children, smiling, scowling, living, feeling and thinking, probably not too much at the moment about what seemed to me the utter absurdity of continued capability of that type of devastation and fragility that still exists in the world. As we were all starting our mornings like the faces in Hiroshima that day, I was trying to wrap my head around that decision, that moment, that depth of loss, and I could not.

But the realization that that capability persists alongside so much relentless power-worship, negligence, hate and otherizing in the world made me feel today as though I had a duty to try.

I wish we were doing more to fathom the unfathomable amount of culture and lives lost to that history, and to any governance or decisions made as if every single human life isn’t some sort of miracle. I wish we were speaking more about how this must never, ever happen again.

I’m not sure what exactly that sounds like. But it seems as if the first step is to at least acknowledge out loud that it already did.

We’ve all heard the quotes about those failing to remember the past being condemned to repeat it. But when it comes to the most unspeakable acts of inhumanity that human history has ever seen — slavery and A-bombs and people in the wealthiest country in the world literally stepping over other people starving in the street, we so infrequently acknowledge them with moments of silence, and even more infrequently do we acknowledge them out loud.

And that so often in our culture, especially when I step out of the Bay Area bubble or circles of activists I run in, I feel like people who write words like “inhumanity” in their social media posts are the ones talked about as weirdos, or wet blankets, or troublemakers, or worst of all, crazy.

I love cat videos, and I would post a whole lot more of them if I thought people were already woken up. If I wasn’t so distracted by the lack of practice of the Golden Rule.

And until I can wrap my head around the shit that goes on at the expense of human dignity yet treated as normal in this country; until I feel like where history is concerned, we’re not complacent or unkind enough to repeat it… I guess I’m fine with being the crazy one. And I’ll be weird as the day is long.

‪#NuclearWeaponsMatter‬

#BlackLivesMatter

#Remember

#Speak