Hiroshima Day: America has been asleep at the wheel for 64 years
It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about, the previous fall.
I thought: “We got it first. And we used it. On a city.”
I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong. [continued…]
Fascinating article. I wonder if school children, 13 and 14 yrs old, have the same awareness in these times. During Bush years, I repeatedly heard them say, “They are our enemies and we have to kill them before they kill us!” Wonder how long it will be before that ‘mindset’ changes specially when the ‘AfPak’ policy is in place and Drones are used to kill the enemy!