Who will notice?
Talking Stick
Hi folks,
I am shifting to no more than one post of daily links and abstracts for this Google mail list. I am breaking that rule this one time. Trying to negotiate Google's primitive layouts and options still makes for a really grim experience when trying to have a decent discussion.
Therefore I am as well posting most of the initial topics on the weblog http://talkingstick.gamountains.net/news and invite you to post your commentary there.
Who will notice?
I must admit to being sorrowed at not finding front page mention of this day being the anniversary of our A-bombing Hiroshima on any of the major newspapers. I wonder at the significance.
Probably the most precise defining parameter of a person's death is when no one longer notices.
But what about transforming historical events? It seems once the memory is lost the conditions that spawned them are bound to recur. That is of course the insight that has for millenia driven celebrations, world courts and memorials to great tragedies such as the Holocaust.
Daniel Ellsberg has a poignant and gripping personal account on TruthDig of his experieces of the dawn and flourishing of the era of nuclear power. Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years
It is long but worth a read, lest we forget.
Conservative anti-social radical individualismi is no more effectively refuted than in the demonstrable power of the notice and succor of one's need by the community of man. I shared tears with millions the other day while observing the women returned from North Korean capitivity as they reminded us that their confidence that we were noticing was sustaining. One hears many accounts from people caught in dire circumstances far distant from material relief.
On my personal journal Morning Worship. I have made note of it in a couple of historical vignettes, including references to the Gaineville Ga. tornado of 1936. Any resident of the area knows it remains a living part of the history of Gainesville.
I add the history of the African poor of New Orleans by lack of notice made invisible and abandoned to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.
Then, again reminded from recent news, the consequences potentially to each of us of failing to notice, making invisible, those who live among us. One wonders if the beautiful women he shot down would be alive with their families had someone noticed the angst of George Sodini, the most recent murderer of multiples.
I am grateful for the lessons from my family, reffirmed daily... to be aware.