(Written last week and having a hard time with this.  Just going to post because I’ve got to do something.)

This morning I watched, as I usually do, CBS Sunday Morning.

There is always a good mix of headline news, humor, and in-depth interviews, but today it was ALL BAD NEWS, the only exception being a story about Pete Davidson from Saturday Night Live and his new movie.  It was a welcome respite.

One of the stories was about the bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.  The 75^TH anniversary of that bombing is coming up in August.

As a freshman in college, I was assigned to do a report on President Harry Truman.  I was astonished to learn that he knew nothing about the bomb until after FDR died.  The Secretary of War went to his office to drop that bomb on him.

The majority of American citizens thought Truman made the right decision in order to end the war – after the fact, of course, and he did, indeed, end that war.  But at what price?

He had weighed the loss of American lives vs. the loss of lives in a major Japanese city and decided their sacrifice was worth it.  I’m guessing he didn’t consult the Japanese.  Oh, that’s right — because otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise.

He and his administration thought the bomb idea good for the Japanese, too, as their losses would not be as astronomical as they would be if we sent in the 700,000 troops we had previously planned for an all-out invasion.  Writing this just now, I’m thinking…really?  This is rational thinking?

Hiroshima was a city of 250,000 citizens with a military installation of 50,000.

The Japanese didn’t surrender after that first bomb, so three days later, we dropped another bomb on Nagasaki.   This time, they surrendered.

The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only uses of nuclear weapons in armed conflict to date. Need I say Thank God?

Many victims were literally vaporized.  Others were horribly burned or had their eyeballs sucked out of their heads.  Where there had been a person, only a shadow remained against the wall when they were vaporized.

This is not to mention the ongoing, lingering effects on their bodies and psyches and the generations to come afterwards.

Is our motto We’ll Kill More of you Before you Kill More of us.

Let’s destroy more lives by shooting, burning, bombing, or by holding our knee on someone’s neck for over eight minutes until he dies because he can’t breathe?

What disturbs me, personally, the most is that I accepted Truman’s decision as the right thing to do.  We were taught it was the right thing to do, and at the time I wrote the report, when I was eighteen years old, I believed he was a hero.  Would I have felt differently if I had been an adult in 1945 feeling as I do now?  God, I hope so, but I worry I might have gone with the spirit of the country at the time.

Next in the broadcast came our current protests regarding racism and the Black Lives Matter movement.

What do I really believe about our racial divide?  Every time a black person was killed by a policeman, I was outraged.  Then what did I do?  Nothing. I might shake my head and even cry, but It’s so easy to go back to your privileged white life and to stick your head in the sand after about two weeks of that outrage.

I’m wondering what I can do to perpetuate the movement that’s happening now.  I’m old now, but there must be something?  It feels different this time.  Please let it be so.

But again, I thought, why is killing the answer?   What was that white policeman thinking as he held George Floyd down?  That solution has never seemed more horrifying and ridiculous than it does at this time.

The next segment on the show informed us of a massacre of black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. White people believed a white woman had been violated by a black man in an elevator in a white-owned building.  It isn’t clear to  me who it was who reported it, or if it even happened.

Nevertheless, white citizens of Tulsa went to the section of town called Greenwood where mostly black people lived and began killing them — over three hundred of them to be more exact.

As if that weren’t enough, they burned their section of town down to the ground.

Greenwood was nicknamed Black Wall Street because it was a thriving black community in Tulsa.  Their economy and culture were strong, and the majority of the people were well educated – not that that makes it any more tragic.  Plenty of tragedy to go around.

Is that what white people were angry about?  Were they jealous?  Why did so many hate so much?

The Tulsa Massacre was kept a secret from the majority of Americans for almost one hundred years.  African-Americans who survived the purge were afraid to talk about it or tell their children and grandchildren.

Later on in the broadcast, I listened to a man named Jorge Castaneda who had been Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the early 2000s  He spoke about how far the United States has fallen since he held his office; how we had been the shining example of a well-functioning democracy.

He said that no one trusts us or looks to us for help any more.  Other countries can no longer entrust their destiny to be in our hands.  Just ask Angela Merkel.

The publisher of a British magazine, the Economist, that among other things rates democracies has moved us to the list of Flawed Democracies.

A French spokesman said he still has hope for us, and while every country seems to be destined to fall or fail at some point (ask the Romans about this), he doesn’t believe this is America’s time, especially with our current protests and/or movements, not only for African-Americans, but for the LBGTQ community, and for women.  Our consciousness has been raised.  May it never falter.

Almost every other foreign spokesperson traced the beginning of our fall to the current administration.  Can you blame them?

We have a president who seems to be on the side of militaristic solutions, who insults our governors, our states, and peaceful protestors; who speaks as if he has never given a thought to what he’s going to say or to whom he says it; who has pulled us out of every international group from The World Health Organization to the Paris Agreement; a president who clears a town square with helicopters, smoke and riot police so that he can walk in front of a church to pose with a bible.

The president leads by yelling and tweeting insults madly.  Why doesn’t he speak of uniting us in a common cause?  I can’t remember a president during my lifetime that didn’t try to uplift us during a crisis rather than denigrate us to flaunt his power.

He did the very same thing in the first debate before the election, yet we elected him.  He continues to act in that same way, and I’ll never understand his supporters.  They don’t understand me either.

How can there be such a divide? How can a Fox News reporter say, “I think President Trump will go down as one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen.”  I just hope the “go down” portion of that statement comes true.

It’s all so very sad, but I’m not giving up on us yet.  That will come if he is re-elected.

The End.