I remember deciding to go to this city resurrected from hellfire for multiple reasons, but the most telling I suppose for me was the fact that I needed to feel it. Nothing else would take me to where I needed to be in modern life than going here, to Hiroshima. Where the first atomic bomb was dropped and where the modern age in many respects began, and equally so, when the seeds of its demise were sown. The nuclear age brought with it a slew of nuclear powers, and an Armageddon waiting to happen which no previous age, save those spoken about in the Bhagavat Gita or the Bible, could match it. But if 81 years is enough time for people to forget the horrors of war and of atomic weapons, then surely thousands of years is simply too far in the past to reach the modern mind.
I spent the night after leaving the horror show that was the Hiroshima museum thinking to myself, “Okay D, let’s take a moment and recognize what we’ve just witnessed. Not just the carnage from the past, but the carefree dismissal of those supposedly learning about it alongside me.” The outcome of this recognition was simple; people today are a far cry from what they were in 1945 in every respect. We don’t even need to be talking about moral aptitude or emotional capacity either, even physically, emotionally, intellectually. Every metric that matters is on a heavy downward slant into hell. You can leave the technological know-how and modern “sensibilities” whatever that means, out of the picture. It doesn’t help sell us as respectable people.
What this tells me is that what happened here 81 years ago will happen again, and with far less restraint than before. The only thing that prevents me from a mad scramble to get into some bunker in New Zealand is the other thing I realized that day, one which took my breath away, and that was the quality of those who lived in Hiroshima today. Unlike the people I saw in Tokyo the people here are different. They smile more. They hold themselves up tall in a different way. As though saying to the universe. “See? Not even dropping a sun on our heads can defeat us or our spirit!” And that along broke my heart again, but this time from a beautify which smiled in the face of horror, and welcomed it in their hearts only to grow beyond its control. And so too must each and every one of us, while we face the horrors of our time.
We all have choices we must make every day, over and over without fail, or it would simply not be the life we choose to live or in the least, the one we call reality. These choices are just as much unconscious as they are conscious, in that, when one decides to go to a job they know does nothing for them except pay for what they buy, and what they buy does nothing but burden them with debt and push them further away from happiness, so too do people accept the veneer of nationhood and the governments which act as its stewards, yet in every case become its jailer. This was true of Imperial Japan, just as it’s becoming inescapably obvious about America, let us hope it doesn’t take dropping a sun or two on the United States to bring an end to its reign of terror...
Feeling existential dread all night I decided to go somewhere uplifting, luckily for me there is a magical island just a tram ride away…