8/6/24

Fur Tuesaay, August 6, 2025

1945 HIROSHIMA

1965 LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.

2018 Chicago police appealed for help after 66 people were shot in the city in one weekend

In bed around 10, up and out around 4:15 when I lit Lilly out into light rain, 21 mph wind with 33 mph gusts.  We've had .45 " of rain in the last 6 hours, and another .25" is expected in the next 24.  Last night at bedtime, perhaps 3 doors south of us.  Geri saw a gurney being wheeled toward the house. ??? 🙏.  . The ambulances turned out to be for our next-door neighbor John McGregor who had been in great pain for a week, much like mine, i.e., hip and leg.  John and I are the same age.  His wife Debby says the docs think he is suffering from spinal stenosis at L4, the same area where I have what x-rays revealed as "severe arthritis."  Hopefully, we will know more about John's condition, and mine, later.. Today is my PM&R appointment with Dr. England.🙏 . . . Dr. England said it takes between 2 and 5 to 7 days for the cortisone injection in my hip to relieve the pain and then only if the cause is arthritis in the hip  If I don't obtain pain relief over that period, they will look for another source of the pain.  Stenosis?  Sciatica?  Fingers crossed but worried, especially after learning of John M.'s situation.

Prednisone, day 86, 15 mg., day 8/14.    Today is day 26 of hip/thigh/knee pain.  I took my 15 mg. at 4:45., followed by some Dave's Bread.

An archival photo of a Hiroshima baby too weak to draw

milk from the mother’s breast.  The baby was

reported to have died three days after the photo.    

Hiroshima.  In July 1965, on my way to Vietnam, I visited the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima with my Marine buddy, Ron Kendall.  From my memoir:

It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt.  I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was.  I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American.  By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers.  By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for.  By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field.  By shared humanity.   The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling.  There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that.  Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be.  But was it necessary to bomb the city?  Two cities?  Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokusoka?  The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the fire bombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa.  The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties.  The firebombing raids proved otherwise.  The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.” 

I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam.  The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.

. . . .  

The best book I have read about modern war is Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,  including this passage:

There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war.  Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble.  The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie, feed into the dislocation and malaise after war.  In the end, neither side dares to speak to the other.  The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence.  It seems better to forget.

“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote [in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle].  “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well.  I am ashamed to be a man.”

. . . .  

From: You have misunderstood the relevance of Hannah Arendt - The thinker has been pillaged by those seeking to denounce Trump. They overlook her most vital insight  by Samuel Moyn,  Prospect, October 20, 2020

"In 1945, in an extraordinary essay entitled “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that it would not be easy to tell the good from the bad German.  In her 1945 essay, Arendt wrote that when she met people who told her they were ashamed of being German, she was always tempted to reply: “I am ashamed of being human.”  " In America, there is going to be immense pressure to exact apologies, if not from Trump (who is incapable of them), then from those who enabled him. Not generalizing responsibility, as Arendt demanded, but othering and scapegoating is how the mainstream will proceed, in an attempt to bracket the Trump era as if it never was, for the sake of a new zero hour. Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American."

Other anniversaries thoughts:  The Voting Rights Act was a great step forward in America's reluctant journey toward racial justice and a truer democracy.  What Congress and LBJ created in 1965, the Republican Supreme Court took away in 2013, on a 5-4 vote, in Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, when it ruled that the preclearance provisions of the Act concerning jurisdictions with a history of denying voting rights to minorities were unconstitutional.  The majority opinion was delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.  What more needs be said?  The Republicans, now led by Trump, continue to assault voting rights by minorities always under the pretext of combatting 'voter fraud,' an almost nonexistent problem in American elections.

66 people were shot in one weekend in Chicago in 2018.  USA!  USA!  USA!