You’ll have to forgive me here from the beginning. What started a couple of weeks ago as a post about simply being grateful has turned into a melting pot of emotions. As I’m sure you know, this month marked the 70th year since the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, killing around 200,000 civilians and injuring another 70,000 (many of whom died from complications later). While I was sharing the idea for this blog post with an American mate back in the U.S., his gut reaction comment was, ‘We ended a war they started’ so now my initial being grateful post is gone and I’m riled up.
Being American but having lived as an expat outside the U.S. most of my adult life has of course had a big affect on me, making it hard to wave the red, white and blue flag at times. Like most everyone outside the U.S., I instinctively view the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings as a horrible WRONG and a tragedy, plain and simple. Yes, it was a war but it was a strategic military move deployed on civilian targets, leaving innocent men, women and children as ghosts or maimed or orphaned. At the very least, it is not something to be PROUD of, and I think that might be something that many Americans need to be deprogrammed from in order to realise.
What we were taught back in school and what Americans are influenced by in the right-wing U.S. media still today is a different kind of rhetoric. It’s sadly funny how influence works. Even stranger how the media or an educator can share with their audience (or class) – even now in 2015 – that those civilian lives were a necessary victim of war and that we, as Americans, should be proud for having ended a war so quickly and efficiently.
I wonder if there are still people in the U.S. who think they were RIGHT to support Bush and the Iraq invasion, only because they don’t want to admit that they were lied to by the government (or that they were actually, undeniably, 100% wrong)?
Honestly I know that the only thing I can do is share my thoughts here and hope that it sparks a conversation. Yet enough decades have passed, with enough analysis and retrospective thought over these actions, that all Americans should be able to own up to the fact that our government 70 years ago made a tragic mistake. The Japanese don’t want an apology because too much time has passed. President Obama tried in 2009, following the embarrassing stand by George W. Bush throughout his entire administration who said, ‘I don’t care what the facts are. I will never apologise.’
Speaking of presidents, I guess I’d like to end this post with a random rant that it is mind-boggling to everyone outside the U.S. right now that some Americans are so ignorantly supporting Donal Trump as a presidential candidate. A country is one single piece of a very large co-dependent puzzle that is our big world, and a President is its ambassador as Commander-in-Chief. He’s an unqualified marketing guy with the class of a toddler, whom we just learned speaks at a 3rd grade level, and who has zero political or diplomatic experience. As a First-World nation, America is a laughing stock at the moment. I cringe imagining him representing the U.S. at a G7 summit or with an army behind him. Heaven help us all…
XOXO Angela
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