Back in rage/Hiroshima-Nagasaki

Pretend love, pretend words, the things I fell for in the years when I wanted to be loved despite it all. Not feeling worthy or lovable, I had to push the envelope always... And gifts were essential, because no gifts meant no love, as had so often been the case in the house of the accountant and his wife, my mother.

I am pulled in ways that are impossible to bear; I am thanked endlessly, lest I figure out that these thanks are wrung out of despair... Behind it all is the resentment that things are not as they always were, without order or boundary, without the ability to do anything or do nothing in a world that consists only of yourself. Funny that once again I am in a situation where a narcissist attempts to rule everything. But this time I am here to say no more, I am here to set and protect my boundaries. No more guilt, no more laying down on the floor and saying, please step on me (unless in a nice massage...)

Yesterday at the gates of the Livermore Conversion Project we heard a Japanese survivor who was 16 at the time of the bombing of Hiroshima. He told of being in school and seeing a bright blast, and then being blinded by sound and noise. But then "it was deathly quiet and pitch dark." Only later would he realize that the roof of the school had fallen on their heads. He talked about seeing people whose eyeballs had popped out of their sockets, and others seeing confused people trying to put their intestines back into their bodies. He watched people all day and all night, as he walked home, holding out their arms in pain... He is one of the Hibakusha, and we had a computer linkup so that they in Japan could see our candles in front of the gates of one of the two places in the US that manufactures every bomb we make against the people of the world.

How many of our children even think about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when we unleashed an inhuman bomb that killed a quarter of a million people and laid waste to two cities, to mothers and their infants, elderly men and women, vegetation, hospitals, indiscriminate destruction.

And when we talk about Japanese imperialism, the truth is that the U.S. wanted to get into the war in Europe but public opinion was strongly against it, so the U.S. manipulated Japan into attacking us so they would have public support to enter the war. We froze Japanese assets and blocked trade. We never cared about British, French or Dutch imperialism in the Pacific, only Japanese. True, Japan had a treaty with Italy and Germany, but the Japanese had made diplomatic concessions to avoid war. We stalled, and as soon as the bomb was made, we flattened two cities and a whole country. It was unnecessary, it was brutal, it was inhumane. Empire always is.