We commemorated the 66th anniversary of Victory in the Pacific and the end of WWII earlier this month. August 6th or 10th would probably have been more appropriate dates to ruminate on the decision to use nuclear weapons against a civilian population in order to save that civilian population.
The photographs and narrative on Patriot Thoughts are indeed thought provoking. The Enola Gay, Bockscar, Little Boy and Fat Man; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Saipan and the Banzai Cliff.
The incomprehensible mindset of the Japanese people of the mid-Twentieth Century.
Tiny Tinian Island, is described as "a flat green dot in the vastness of Pacific blue." The very idea that a place that today looks like this:
was the starting block for this:
and this:
is, in itself, a stunning notion that sends the mind into a self-examining do-loop.
What the science of History has been able to extrapolate from an unbiased, dispassionate distance is this: the utter and total destruction of Japan's major cities led to the metamorphosis of her culture; led to a nation that today is capable of creating this:
We've seen the rise and fall of great peoples -- and great cities -- throughout human recollection. Even recently, and very close to home.
When New Orleans drowned, her rotten-to-the-core, inadequate public education system crumbled along with her. Today, that education system is among the fastest-improving systems in the state. Perhaps, wiping the slate clean and having little to build upon save that which is buried beneath our feet, is what gives rise to legitimate human progress. Civilizations are built upon civilizations.
What does that truth suggest about our Nation during the first term of Barack Hussein Obama? Are we crumbling as a people, looking to rise from our own ashes? Will it take that to get us back on track to being the world's Superpower? Or, are we sliding toward a penniless and wretched decline as just another cog in the global machine? Is that really what the Progressive movement desires? Can it possibly be?
Perhaps August 21st is just as good a day as the 6th or 10th to wax philosophical on the destruction of a once great nation -- whether, as Rome, caused by rotting from within like a gangrene, or as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by nuclear holocaust.
Would that I had some answers.
