What will I say when my children ask me…
I absolutely cannot believe that I totally forgot the terrible significance of this day. I feel like such an ass for not giving it a single thought until now, as the sun begins to set on me and my neighbors.
But now that I’ve been reminded, I’ll be thinking about those hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in cold blood. The mothers. The fathers. The children. All of them–total strangers though they were, who lived long before my time–are on my mind right now.
Nobody in this country should ever forget what this day means. Nobody. Ever.
Nobody.
Ever.
August 7th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Make sure to take a listen to Utah Phillip’s “Enola Gay:
I turn to see
the fireball rising
“My god, my god” all I can say
I hear a voice
within me crying
My mother’s name was Enola Gay
August 7th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
What will I say
when my children ask me
Where was I flying upon that day?
With trembling voice
I gave the order
To the bombardier of Enola Gay
Charles W. Johnson—whose blog post I linked to in my own—recently turned me on to Utah Phillips’ music, and I rather like it. Unfortunately, Phillips recently passed on.
August 12th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I used to buy into the notion of “think of all the lives that were saved.” What a crock of shit. The two bombings of tens of thousands of innocent civilians ranks up there with all the other many monstrous evils of the 20th century. The bombing of Dresden can be added to the atrocities committed by the US (along with the Allies in this case).
A very simple point can be made: They could have chosen to focus the bombs on military targets, which are supposed to be fair game during wartime. They chose not to, and there is absolutely no excusing that.
I add, though, a note to Holocaust deniers, because I’ve seen some of their whinings: It doesn’t wipe away the shit perpetrated by Germans, Turks, and other European nations during WWII.