On My Mind...

“But is it so entirely clear that we won the war [World War II]? Wasn’t there a sense in which we were defeated in that war, and I don’t mean only by the early disasters? I would say that we were defeated to the extent that we became like the enemy we opposed. Early in the war we condemned the Germans for their indiscriminate bombing of civilians. By 1943 or 1944 we were engaging in the most terrible bombing of civilians in history. Hundreds of thousands died in the firebombing of Dresden, Tokyo, and other German and Japanese cities. And then on August 6 and 9 the United States unleashed the only two atom bombs ever to be used, unleashed them on the large, crowded cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As an eighteen-year-old at the time, looking forward to immediate induction into the army, I like most other Americans, had no doubt that using the atom bomb was the right thing to do. Only considerably later did I come to see it as second only to the Holocaust among the crimes of the twentieth century.”
--Robert Bellah in “Seventy-Five Years”



Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima. On that day, somewhere around 140,000 civilians were killed immediately by the dropping of an atomic bomb. In time, about double that number would die from burns and from radiation poisoning. The future generations born of Hiroshima’s survivors did not escape the effects of the radiation either, as thousands more were to be stricken with severe diseases and disfigurements. To add insult to injury, those survivors affected by the bomb, the hibakushka, were made pariahs in their society for fear of contamination. It’s not much of a leap to say that the bombing of Hiroshima was one of the largest, if not the largest, terrorist attacks in history.

Tonight, I’m keeping Hiroshima in mind as I pray. I’m praying for the 85,000 surviving hibakushka. And I’m also praying for the church in these difficult times. I’m praying for forgiveness for the atrocities we’ve helped commit and are currently committing. And I’m praying that God will grant us the courage and the faithfulness to cease being culpable in tragedies like Hiroshima and to start being the sort of peaceable people He calls us to be.