The movie Oppenheimer opened yesterday at the local movie theater. I would like the see the movie, but three hours is a long time to sit and focus attention on what I am sure will be a traumatic theme. I have ordered the book American Prometheus, the basis of the movie. The title reminds me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - The Modern Prometheus. The movie would have been more properly subtitled Vishnu the Destroyer of Worlds.
We commemorate
September 11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center and the loss of
three thousand lives as a crime against humanity. But
history is perspective - written by the winners.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima Japan instantly killing 140,000 men, women, children, and old people – dogs, cats… and no birds sang.
Then five days later the good Christian people of America celebrated a second bomb killing 70,000 human beings in Nagasaki.
210,000 civilians - non-combatants
- died instantly; thousands more died from radiation, and for decades children
were born with deformities. This is
never mentioned in our classroom history books.
The movie Oppenheimer
should make us all pause and think.
There are
12,705 nuclear weapons possessed by nine countries, thousands of nuclear
powerplants each capable of catastrophic meltdowns, and the real possibility of
weaponizing the new cold-fusion science
How can a
violent species such as ours be trusted with weapons of mass destruction?
the Ol'Buzzard
One way or another (nuclear war or environmental destruction), we will destroy ourselves and everything else on earth. It seems to be our nature and fate.
ReplyDeleteIt breaks my heart. But, maybe earth will survive. Sadly, we will never know. I just try to enjoy this amazing and wonderful place everyday.
ReplyDeleteWe can't be Trusted with them. But it's a Genie unable to be put back in the bottle. Along with the new concerns of Artificial Intelligence, it concerns me that just becoz we can Invent something, perhaps we just shouldn't sometimes. As for History being whitewashed or not taught at all, well, we've got slews of that kind of History, don't we?
ReplyDelete