Moral Awakening

   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.

    A terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past...the dead...over 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children, thousands of Koreans, 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...

​      The world 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.

    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. 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 toolmaking, 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 easily 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 as 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 and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos...

     Perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.  For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.

     The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell.

​     That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago...

     Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it.

​    The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is.

      It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.
         -President Barack Obama,  May 27, 2016 at the Hiroshima Memorial, Hiroshima, Japan,

References:
1.  "At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require ‘Moral Revolution’", Gardiner Harris, The New York Times, May 27, 2016

2.  Text Of President Obama's Speech in Hiroshima, Japan, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/asia/text-of-president-obamas-speech-in-hiroshima-japan.html