The Oleander: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

It was not a headline event, but it should have been.

Last night a meeting at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock (UUCSR) remembered the devastating loss of life 68 years ago at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  Estimates of those killed in the two attacks range from 150,000 to 246,000.

Those present at the meeting included Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, North Hempstead Supervisor Jon Kaiman, State Assemblywoman Michele Schimel (represented by Fran Reid), Jamie McKaie of UUCSR, Ariel Flajnik,  Margaret Melkonian, Shirley Romaine and musician Dave Sear.

In one sense, it was a meeting about a missing headline. When I searched on YouTube for “Hiroshima remembrance 2013” there were no results. The August 6 front page of the digital New York Times did not mention it.

It was a missing headline which different speakers sought to supply – each lamenting not only the ongoing presence of sanctioned violence, but the even more disturbing absence of civil debate about its use. As Goodman pointed out, this relative lack of serious debate is an affront to those in the military who are asked to risk everything on behalf of national interests.

Co-sponsored by Great Neck SANE/Peace Action, the Social Justice Committee of the Congregation and the Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives, the meeting was organized around the principle of “Rethinking Security.”

Whatever interpretation of World War II history one favors, audience members were encouraged to sign petitions. One was to support the Mayors for Peace. Mayors for Peace was begun by a former mayor of Hiroshima, and has an active campaign to begin negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020.  The campaign includes more than 5,500 cities worldwide, and 196 in the United States.

Which New York cities? Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Lake George, Rochester, Schenectedy and Spring Valley.  Not the Town of North Hempstead.

Another petition was to encourage political leaders to engage in multilateral talks to further nuclear disarmament.

Whether the atomic bombings are adequately studied in U.S. secondary education is not for me to decide. But every citizen of the only world actor to have used nuclear weapons who feels some indirect responsibility  – or at the least, curiosity – should acquaint themselves with the debate surrounding their use – and the use of other weapons of mass destruction. In World War II, these included incendiary bombs used on 67 Japanese cities, as well as in Germany.  One’s moral sense is also likely tested by the decision not to warn anyone – civilian or military – even though leafleting had been practiced extensively by the U.S. military in Japan prior to those attacks.  Likewise, a “demonstration” explosion was ruled out.

Today the oleander is the official flower of Hiroshima because it was the first to bloom after the devastation. The fact is ironic. The oleander is mildly poisonous, yet its white, pink or red flowers can be beautiful.  And the oleander – as Wikipedia’s writer phrases it -- “is so widely cultivated that no precise region of origin has been identified.”

So it is with the causes of violence -- in our cities or abroad. Indeed, the rationale for such violence is “widely cultivated.” Even as some seek to justify the use of such a weapon, the demon has long been is out of the bottle and dangerously prevalent.

We would do well not to forget those who paid a terrible price for a lesson we seem not to have learned.

Link to a Slate Reuters video of the 2013 service in Hiroshima.