Thank you

Yesterday in my email I received a slide show of Arial photographs from around the world. I was scrolling through, enjoying the lovely images, when I came across one that looked vaguely familiar. It was of a white, burned out shell of a building with a small tower, on top of which were skeleton ribs of the dome roof. The photo was so good that you could see that the ground around it had been cleared and cared for. This was a building that had been left like this for a reason.

From deep within me came a sorrow and as I read the caption this sorrow rose up in an overwhelming tide and I sat there sobbing as I read The
Epicentre Hiroshima.

This one image for some reason touched me. I recognised it from photos of the devastation after the dropping of the atomic bomb but had never seen a photo of it in the present role...

After the sobbing stopped I started checking for other sites on Hiroshima. I found images of the dead, the stats, the lists of the numbers killed. I saw pictures of the totally indiscriminate devastation. Sorrow was replaced with anger and judgement. How could anyone do such a thing? Then I read the postings on the web sites. Small minded idiots, I thought. All the time I was angry, I was judging. How could people not see the total hideousness of this action? Just because terrible things had been done by the Japanese during the war was it right to use this to justify killing on such a large scale? It would be like giving me the right to kill someone's children because their father had killed mine. By now I was off on one. I had used the feeling of sorrow and changed it, it was easier to vent all my frustrations and fears, rather than face the suffering, the suffering that mankind can inflict on his fellow man. Easier than facing the fact that I was part of the species and as such could not escape involvement.

Then I stopped and thought about what I was doing. How I was fuelling the negativity, judging, adding not one positive action, learning nothing. Sometimes the veneer of our civilisation proves a little thin but without it where are we?

So that is why I need your help - not for me but to pour back a little positive energy into this world; to tip the balance just a little. I know that you are already doing this but I need you to do just a little bit more for me. Go and look at a tree, smile at a stranger or buy yourself an extra large, special coffee. If you do this I will not be hurting quite so much.

If, like me, you feel it helps, send out a little of what you do to Hiroshima, to those who suffered and to those who are still suffering - on all sides.

Thanks