August 6th is a day that cannot slip by unnoticed. I was not alive to experience that day in 1945 and it is not possible to imagine how I might have felt.
Strangely, I never asked my parents about it, never heard them speak of it.
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Six years of world war unavoidably hardened all those who lived it and probably the atomic bomb was seen as a most welcome ending to it all.
Even if a surrender had been already in the works.
It is understandable that those who suffered in that dreadful conflict would have little or no compassion for the civilian victims of the atomic bombs.
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A kind and gentle friend of mine, spent her earliest years in a Japanese concentration camp. To the end of her life she could not let go of the anger that she directed even at young Japanese Americans.
Having only ever been on the periphery of war, I have no right to judge any war victim.
Acts of violence have always shocked me. In 2001 my father was living near me in Seattle. On the morning of September 11th, I drove over to see him knowing that he was unlikely to have heard the news from New York.
He turned on his television and briefly watched the coverage, but seemed to regard my agitated state as an overreaction. Perhaps WW2 had immunised him against such sights.
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Those of us who were born in England just after the war grew up in its shadow. You couldn’t not be aware of the bomb sites even if your parents avoided war talk.
In those days if you went to the cinema, which we often did, there was a newsreel first and much of what I viewed lodged in the back of my mind to form future unaccountable anxieties.
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But I don’t know how I learned about the death camps and the atomic bomb. Before the internet, you gradually acquired knowledge one way or another and hoped to get a correct version of the facts.
At boarding school in England in 1962, we all knew about Inter-continental ballistic missiles and I remember well those anxious days wondering if the world would end over the Cuban missile crisis.
It was the time of Ban the Bomb and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, yet how close did we come to nuclear war?
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While I do not believe that anger is man’s default condition, I know that it exists in even the gentlest of us.
For a significant part of my life, white-hot anger festered within me. Trying to contain it only made the occasional rupture more frightening.
Frightening to me.
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I don’t want to be angry.
I don’t want to be hard, unkind, intolerant.
Judgmental.
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The anger, which ate me alive inside has gone, the fuel that fed it blown away in the winds of time. But the pilot light does not go out.
Like it or not, we are controlled by our emotions and by those who would manipulate them.
Will we ever free ourselves of them?
And if we do?
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This is absolutely not what I intended to write today, but noting the date it did not seem right to let it pass unremarked.
Inevitably, it is a sobering subject.
I think the film has something to do with your memory. But you cannot sit on a fence idea.
Still, your photos are brilliant, as always! Thank you!
Joanna
I’m not quite sure what you mean about a fence idea. Maybe I did not express myself well.
As I look at your beautiful photos and surroundings, it’s hard to imagine that there was ever (and still are) wars. You’re right, one doesn’t want to go through life angry 🌸.
It is a sobering thought that there has never been a time in history that has been free of war!
My dad’s brother was taken prisoner by the Japanese during the fighting in Burma. He was scarred for life by his experience with Japanese soldiers. I later read about their atrocities in China, and everywhere else they eventually invaded. I accept no excuse that it was their ‘culture’, not a one. They were barbaric, pure and simple. They enjoyed their appaling barbarism and atrocities in a way that we could never understand in our right-minds.
My uncle Harry would have dropped 20 Atom bombs on Japan if he had his way.
Even now, I have to say I tend to agree with him.
Best wishes, Pete.