It’s August and commemorations of the bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and of Nagasaki three days later honor the lives lost. We’re reminded of the gruesome destruction and the inhumanity released on the world through the atomic bomb.
Podcasts and radio raise the voices of survivors and the unanswered debate lingers: Wasn’t the carnage of Hiroshima enough? Why did the US bomb Nagasaki?
As a youth I was taught the United States won the war and saved lives through the use of nuclear weapons. I don’t recall learning much about horrific annihilation. And I can assure you I never learned about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bayard Russell and W. E. B. Du Bois speaking up for nuclear disarmament or ending nuclear testing. Nor was I aware of the racial connections they drew as they warned against the use of the bomb in Vietnam and Korea.*
While we all knew the first atomic bomb test happened in New Mexico, we’re only now learning that generations of families living near the test site are still haunted by cancers linked to that initial explosion. We were not taught that the government did not take the time to warn residents about what was coming, nor did they ever document the after effects. We can thank concerned citizens and family members for that research.
I ask myself, what will it take for people to end this nightmare of nuclear war? We fear it. Yet we continue to glorify war and refuse to find peaceful solutions. We teach our histories of omission and refuse to take responsibility for guiding our government to a new direction. Abolition of violence, in our selves and in our world, still waits for us.
This is the map of the first atomic test site in New Mexico known as Trinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)
*https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/web-dubois-coretta-scott-king-ban-the-bomb/
let kindness win 
!
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