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Image: Ruel del Jamorol
Interconnectedness reveals itself in innumerable ways, most very subtle, often hidden. Few are this disarming
I have been staunchly anti-war since I was a teenager, confidently so, smugly perhaps, schooled on Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Tom Hayden, and David Harris. But my commitment was never tested. I read Gandhi and fancied myself a pacifist at 15. That changed when my first child was born twelve years later. I drew number 328 in the lottery of February 1972 and did not have to decide. All three options terrified me. I got option four.
I held special contempt for the use of atomic weapons on civilians. I resisted ethical pretzel logic to rationalize those two acts, which occurred eight years before my birth. That was a comfortable distance for a harsh moral judgment. A kid with nothing to lose, objecting from the cheap seats.
But the distances were much closer than I thought, more intimate, more connected. I was involved. I am culpable. I pushed the button. I was burned alive.
I grew up in a Manhattan Project town. My dad, my uncles and aunts, my grandfathers, and the parents and elders of most every kid I knew worked on the project during the war, before the conversion to peaceful uses for nuclear fission that allowed garage doors to open and close by themselves. Directly or tangentially, what these good people were doing was creating the plutonium that fueled Fat Man, a nuclear weapon we detonated over the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing 74,000 people.
Because of Groves’ and Oppenheimer’s success, I grew up in a town with good schools, paved streets with sidewalks, parks, a great basketball team, programs for kids, and Fourth of July fireworks. We never spoke of the “because”, and I never knew or understood until I was older. Richland, Washington and Nagasaki, Japan are sister cities of a terrible sort. My contemporaries in Nagasaki surely have a much different perception of our relationship. I wonder if they speak of the “because”. I wonder if they know of Richland.
This connection is intimate and profound and cannot be broken. I see it and I cannot look away. All of us, my granddad, Oppenheimer, a seventy-two-year-old man in Kyushu, me, are all bound together, connected over time and circumstance, with reason, judgment, loss, and blame all moot.
Our Lakota friends say Mitakuye oyasin. We are all related.
Indeed, we are.
My lesson in connection.
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