Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.英语教学工作计划
Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans and a dozen Americans held prisoner.
Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.
重阳节送给爷爷奶奶的祝福语 It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood, used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind.
On every continent the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity
of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen, peoples have been subjugated and liberated, and at each juncture innocents have suffered -- a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.
The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth, and yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.
招行信用卡最低还款教导工作总结 In the span of a few years some 60 million people would die: men, women, children -- no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. 杭州特小吃
农村如何致富 There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.
Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction -- how the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily do we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause?
Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness. And yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith has a license to kill.
Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different. Science allows us to communicate across the seas, fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos. But those same
discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.
The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.
That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see.
We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war, and the wars that came before, and the wars that would follow.
Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.
Some day the voices of the Hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of August 6, 1945 must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination, it allows us to change.
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