War, Peace and Children

Last night, I was lying in bed thinking about Hiroshima. Yeah, Hiroshima. What popped into your mind at the word? I'm guessing it wasn't their baseball team.

Hiroshima = Atomic Bomb. The two concepts are indelibly linked; this place and this thing that was done to people. People. I can't wrap my head around that. More than 66,000 people, gone, in an instant. Many, many more died in the days and months to follow, agonizing deaths brought about by environmental toxicity and internal damage. That's not something my brain understands. As an abstract concept, maybe; but the truth of it just passes around my head. Nothing goes in.

I have heard about the shadow people of Hiroshima. Human bodies deflected some of the heat from the initial, brilliant flash of the bomb and left 'shadows' against stone and concrete. For those near the epicenter of the blast, this imprint was all that remained of their earthly existence.

Nope, there's no way I can 'get it'. People did this. Human beings forged the weapon and dropped it on two cities. On August 6, 1945, 66,000 people expired.

And as I'm lying there, I start to think about children. The sweet discovery of children, the wide eyed wonder of children. The way that babies will focus their full attention on an ant crawling across their knee. The way you can make a three year old giggle and smile just by making a funny face. The way my daughter's eyes get when her feelings are hurt; absolutely transparent. There is such an innocence, such a fragility to a child.

And our government is dropping bombs on them...

..and we are letting them.

Babies. Tiny, little lives that did nothing, knew nothing, came into the world trusting with their arms outstretched. This is what happend: Little smiles and shining eyes were extinguished in an instant, vaporized. Some weren't; some had the eyes burned out of their sockets and their lungs burned as they sucked in the air to cry. Some endured long enough to feel themselves scorched from inside. Some survived with pain that would never leave them for a breath. They were babies.

Is this uncomfortable? It should be worse than that, it should horrifying. If you have a child, you have imagined your child knowing fear and pain, and not being able to help them. You have imagined that something might 'get' them in the night, and hurt them. Something got these children.

Something still does.

We cannot continue to accept the terms of warfare. We cannot continue this charade that there is an acceptable number of innocent lives to destroy in the name of political expediency. Let's do it the hard way. If any man say otherwise, let his child be the first sacrificed. That child will be the first 'collateral life' of the battle. If it is the dear, sweet child who brings meaning to our war commanders' lives, if their near and dear were chosen to suffer, then no child would suffer at all. We would find another way to solve our differences. Let the care and protection of children be the responsibility of every individual. I think we would be better custodians of these wards than we have proved custodians of the earth.

We still drop bombs, and we can't. There is simply no reason on earth suitable for harming children.

We just can't.