* I'm taking it a bit slow today after working my tail off for the past week and a half on my two August speeches for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I spent one whole week doing research and then several days making notes and putting them in order. Then I did my first draft of the speech in a 12-hour blaze of mind dump and am quite pleased with what I came up with. Now I've got a couple local folks looking it over before I send it to a few others for their comments.* Our Global Network friends in Albuquerque, New Mexico are holding a protest today about the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. They plan to "visit the three offices of our Congressional delegation to tell them to GROUND THE DRONES and to stop the development of the horrible laser and death ray weapons taking place now at Kirtland AFB."
* If you haven't yet seen the upgraded Global Network web site you should take a look at it here. The chairperson of our organization, Dave Webb from Leeds, England, is also our web master and has just done a total remake of the site. It's getting nice reviews.
* It's raining here today, I think the great flood is on the way. Forecasters predict rain everyday for the next week. The slugs are dancing in our garden.
As an American I lived in Tokyo many years ago, and my first child was born there on December 7. That would have been Pearl Harbor Day if we weren't on the other side of the international date line. When I remarked on this irony to well-educated Japanese friends, their response was always: "What's Pearl Harbor Day?" The day to remember WWII was August 6, when they were the victims.
ReplyDeleteThis human tendency has come back to me time and time again when Americans rev up their victimhood around 9/11. Bush and now Obama repeat the date like a mantra. But I think that when a bomb falls on someone somewhere, that we are all the target. And we are all responsible for raising our voices in dissent. The Japanese people I was friends with had this view: that Japan's citizens had been the victims of the military-industrial complex that ruled Japan through a fascist dictatorship. They thought there was nothing they could do. Maybe there's nothing we can do, either, but I'm not going to stop trying. Thanks for keeping on keeping on, Bruce. Your blog helps my morale.