What happened to us as a nation on August 6, 1945?
What happened to us as a nation on August 6, 1945? How did Hiroshima erode our sense of morality, what we permit ourselves as a nation to do? How did it affect our fragile sense of what is permissible for one human being to do to another? Did the use of a weapon designed to ruthlessly annihilate whole cities contribute to where we find ourselves today? Finally, what is the line of connection from Hiroshima to Vietnam, from Hiroshima to Iraq, and on to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? The value of one single, particular human life guards against the vilification of a whole nation, a group, a race, a tribe. It forces each of us to confront the part of us that wants to reduce the value of another in order to destroy them. If we make them “Japs,” then killing them is not the same as killing a fellow human being. But of course that isn’t true. And that is why my haircutter cried when he saw Letters from Iwo Jima. Because even though they were the losers and our “enemy,” the movie humanizes the Ja
