In the year I was born, Phil Och released his first album “All the news that’s fit to sing”. In that year there was significant escalation in the US involvement in the Vietnam War, the first fully televised war, and we began our journey “all the way with LBJ”.
At that time Phil released “What are you fighting for?” with the prescient lyrics:
And read your morning papers, read every single line
And tell me if you can believe that simple world you find
Read every slanted word ’til your eyes are getting sore
Yes I know you’re set for fighting, but what are you fighting for?
Listen to your leaders, the ones that won the race
As they stand right there before you and lie into your face
If you ever try to buy them, you know what they stand for
I know you’re set for fighting, but what are you fighting for?
But the hardest thing I’ll ask you, if you will only try
Is take your children by their hands and look into their eyes
And there you’ll see the answer you should have seen before
If you’ll win the wars at home, there’ll be no fighting anymore
In the years since, what has changed? A media beyond limp and compliant and full of lie; a government blindly obedient to US masters and interest groups and feeding you garbage; human lives sacrificed for profit and corporate greed and our leaders, political or otherwise, complicit.
Well, make a noise. Let them know that they don’t speak in your name.
Another war with, this time, a holocaustic genocide played out live before our eyes and, yet again, the US funding and enabling the aggressor. And the insightless boast “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing.” Indeed, it was. Pointless, meaningless and death rained down from an American bomber with no need or justification other than taking care of business.
As Francesca Albanese comments “the genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many”.
On Hiroshima Day I will leave the last word to Japanese (Nagasaki) poet Ms Fukuda Sumako:
People making atomic bombs!
Rest from your work for a while and close your eyes.
It was on August 9, 1945!
An atomic bomb that you had made
Claimed tens of thousands of precious lives and
Brought houses and assets to naught in a flash,
Completely devastating loving families.
Survivors had to
Recover from scratch
To follow a tough, long road to bloody lives
With deep concern that an “atomic bomb disease” would end their lives any day and
Infinite grievance over the loss of their families and relatives
Haunting them forever.
