While the Rest of the World Mourned the 60th Anniversary of the Drop of the Bombs... Bush Partied and the US Ignored

Yesterday's 60th anniversary of the American bombings in Japan was met with prayer, solemnity, and sorrow in much of the rest of the world. Here? Little mention of it.

I don't think this country has ever been able to properly understand its own role in committing one of the worst atrocities ever seen on this planet. Ironic how we whine and cry about other countries even thinking about possessing nuclear weapons even as we ignore that we used them to incinerate and poison and damage tens of thousands of innocent Japanese.

I've written of my dad, a quiet WWII War hero of sorts. He spoke little of the war although I remember him talking a bit about going into either Nagasaki or Hiroshima within 48 hours of the bombs dropping. My father before his death at age 39 - and one can't help but wonder if entering the city so soon after the bombs dropped was a factor in his early death - probably never could have imagined how his war experiences would result in a daughter, born fairly long after the end of WWII, who learned from what he said and has become so outspoken against war and its human consequences.

I only myself saw my dad cry once, and it was for memory of a child's image - a child climbing a ladder - that was burned onto the side of a building as the bomb flashed.

"The sons of bitches," he said as he cried. He told me the child looked to be about four or five, and I was not quite four when he told me this story.

Although it did no good, I spent a good deal of yesterday crying, praying, thinking... about that four year old who was born and died well before I was born, and of the politicians who sent my father, then a man in his early 20s, to a war that would do something like drop those bombs.