June 24, 2006
Saturday

Humanity was forever cast into the lethal shadow of our own making at 8:15 am on August 6th, 1945. The roiling mushroom cloud of Hiroshima marks the threshold into a quickly-closing horizon.

It is a specter of Now, this event of 61 years ago. It is evidence of humanity's willingness to inflict horrific destruction on a scale beyond denial.

How is it so easy for our species to kill and maim one another? We have done it, and do it, repeatedly: Wounded Knee, Dachau, Bosnia, DaNang, Baghdad, South Centraland the local Mini Mart. It does not matter so much as where but why? Nor is it even a matter of who for it seems to be an impulse to violence that lurks deep inside our own personal underworlds.

Let us have a national moment of reflection on this August 6th anniversary. Perhaps the five minutes just before the Noon hour, the halfway point of the day, would allow us to acknowledge that we have reached a pivotal moment in the survival of our species. We will either march lock-step in another psychic epidemic of murder or we will embrace our living Earth and all its creatures. The shadow disallows both.

We are destined to continue slaughtering one another unless we stop to reflect on our terrible love of annihilation. This is our pattern. We are intelligent enough to create weapons of mass destruction but we have not shown the wisdom in refusing to do so. Will we all be but shadows burned onto the walls of buildings as those of Hiroshima-bearing collective witness to our fatal capabilities? If we pause to reflect on the Earth, as taken from space, we will find reason enough not to join the other extinct species.

Perhaps five minutes can save a lifetime.

Dennis Archambault
Calabasas, CA - USA

About: Dennis Archambault is a writer and the author of "Odyssey Dreams", an American historical novel.

 

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