Nuclear Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima, Japan

Today in the local English language version of the Japanese newspaper the Daily Yomiuri, there was an article which quoted the Mayor of Hiroshima as saying “Those who forget the past are destined to repeat it”. This was in reference, of course, to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the USA in World War II. The author of the article was in Hiroshima, Japan, interviewing survivors, and searching for the souls who were lost in the incident. By way of reply at what I consider to be the stupidity of this statement, I wrote the following and sent it off to the newspaper,

Article

“Those who refuse to be changed by the past are condemned to repeat it”. This is what Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba should have said, when speaking at the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by the United States. Our obligation as human beings is to take in the lessons to be learned from our mistakes, and then forget about them and move on. By commemorating the worst and most shameful acts perpetrated by one human being on his fellow man, by the annual remembrance of those who died, by building museums and preserving the locations where these atrocities took place, we contain and conserve the energy of the very thing which we purport to despise and condemn.

Please, please, please, let us forget about what the Americans did to the Japanese in Hiroshima. Let us forget what the Nazis did to the Jews in Poland. Let us forget about the first and second world wars. I do not want to be forever reminded of how cruel and evil it is possible for human beings to become, and I certainly do not want to build monuments which serve to prolong the memory.

Forget the Bad, Celebrate the Good

Instead, we should commemorate the grandiose nature of the human spirit. We should celebrate the immense good and altruism of which we are all capable, and for which there are also many, many examples throughout our history. Let us build monuments to, and fill our daily lives with these thoughts and images which uplift the human spirit. And which demonstrate the higher mind; a higher state of being which we can all cultivate. In this way we help to create a better world in which we would never contemplate for an instant, perpetrating harmful, evil deeds on one another. We would have no thoughts about, or terms of reference for such a thing.

National newspapers have a responsibility to the public. What we used to call “common sense” has now become “conditioned sense”, and it is the politicians and those in control of the media who do the conditioning. What the average person hears the Prime Minister say, or what he reads in his newspaper, what he receives directly into his living room via television, become his “de facto” thoughts and opinions. He believes what he sees and hears, his opinions are formed, he is effectively told what to think, and his yardstick of what is now acceptable is also thereby registered in his subconscious.

We have no need to search for lost souls in Hiroshima, they are all around us. The souls who are lost, are the souls still stuck in the mindset which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and there are many. Let us seek to help those souls choose a different path in the future. The real lost souls, are those who even today are calculating and preparing to let loose weapons of destruction far more potent than those unleashed on Hiroshima. These lost souls are in positions of power and influence over you and I, but we still have a choice. By choosing to celebrate all that is good in the human spirit instead of all that is evil, then we serve to make this side of our nature grow. If we nurture and feed our souls, then they too will grow. In this way we influence the future so that what happened in Hiroshima is truly forgotten and truly will never be repeated.

Care Not Kill, Love Not Loath

Any psychologist will confirm that whatever the human mind chooses to focus on, will grow in intensity and become its reality. So, let us choose to focus our minds on uplifting human consciousness to a level where we care not kill, where we love not loath, where we nurture not annihilate. Then, indeed, we will be destined never to repeat history.

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Copyright © 2009 Michael Curley. All rights reserved.