How we hold on to history

When I was a child, I was fascinated by an object my father had been given right after World War II. In my mind’s eye, I can still see this chunk of concrete about three inches square. The top was covered with what looked and felt like blisters, molten-like, and then hardened atop the concrete piece. It had come from Hiroshima.

A friend of my father’s was an Army information specialist sent to Hiroshima not long after the atomic bomb had devastated the city. He brought back several small pieces of concrete that bore the indelible mark of the intense heat the bomb had generated. He gave one to my father, who kept it in a small box in his closet.

A veteran himself of World War II, my dad didn’t show many people this small bit of history because I think it was such a formidable, heavy reminder of the advent of atomic warfare. He showed it to me only because I was writing a school report about World War II.

With President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima on Friday and today’s Memorial Day observance, I thought back to that small chunk of blistered concrete. As a lead-in to the president’s visit, I read retrospectives in The New York Times about Pope John Paul II’s visit to Hiroshima in 1981. He saw reminders of everyday life that ended in a matter of seconds when the bomb fell. Decrying the technology that brought the world to such a destructive act, Pope John Paul II said, “From now on, it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.”

I was a child of the 1950s and 1960s and was one of those who regularly participated in “bomb drills” in school, when we were taught to crouch under our desks in preparation for bombs that the Soviets might be dropping out of the sky. Many years later I found out that my Russian friends had similar drills, learning to seek shelter under their desks as protection from potential American bombs. For decades, however, the world has been able to save itself from atomic warfare by “conscious choice and through a deliberate policy.”

Terrorism is now the global replacement for fear of atomic war. As President Obama said in 2009, “In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.” In a world rife with potential terrorism, nations need to remember the pope’s words about conscious choices and deliberate policies as much as ever.

We don’t think about nuclear attack on a daily basis here in South Carolina. But on our own scale, we do have a preponderance of potentially society-altering challenges that require more conscious choice and deliberate, thoughtful policies if our state is to be a rational, thoughtful place to live. Governing by inducing fear seems to be the modus operandi for some of our lawmakers.

Still reeling from senseless, massive violence last summer, we can’t agree to implement wiser gun laws; in fact, there are proposals to loosen them. We want to place unrealistic burdens on refugees who might enter our state, as well as the people who sponsor them. We stopped just short of passing gender-based bathroom laws based on unrealized fear.

In Charleston a few months ago, I watched a woman pick up a small piece of brick in front of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church. She turned to a friend and said that she just wanted a tangible reminder of the tragedy to help her remember to love and understand others. In its own way, maybe that piece of concrete from Hiroshima carries the same message.

Albert Einstein, whose research was utilized by those physicists who developed the bomb, perhaps deserves the last word. He said, “What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.”