I am sometimes given the chance to remember who I am and why it is that I am such. In other words, to see why it is that I am doing something or moving towards a goal. I think to often we get caught up in what we are doing and forget why we are doing it. Today, I watched 'The Day After Trinity.' The documentary is that of Robert Oppenheimer's coming to create and then to scorn the atomic bomb. After watching the movie, I walked to the place where his office once resided here at Berkeley, so many years ago. It was a rather haunting experience. Here I stood in a sort of quantum reality of a shadow too horrific to try to reason in. I could only weep, not just for the destruction of lives that occured through the use of a nuclear bomb... but for the lives of those who seem to leave less .... beguiling and lurid pictures. While I have not been desensitized to the film and photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I have seen them enough times to - when they were presented- let my mind seek the processes and mechanisms of how it happened, and why... Moreover, I thought about the millions who die or suffer in such ways that are never known... for hunger leaves less visible signs than a nuclear slaughter.

Why do we accept thousands of automobile accidents per year, yet wince at a car blast that claims the lives of a single person? Cannot both be just as ghastly? Aye, then there is something deeper... most likely the intent behind it. Intent- a peculiar idea, since it encapsulates motive and planning and forethought. A sense of moral wrongdoing...is inherent in 'mal-intent'. With 'accidents' there is mitigated, if any, intent. Yet what about forgotten intent, or hidden intent? That is, does a group of persons forming an entity... a cult, a club, a para-military unit, a state (or select persons in a state), a corporation (also, usually some individuals) not have intent in something that they may do that is with the same horrific ramifications? If your intent is to gain personal status- be it wealth or reputation or what not... and in that process, you create human decay and cause suffering on recognizable levels... then is that not tantamount to a crime as blithe as dropping nuclear bombs?

See, the bombing of Hiroshima took 9 seconds.. the results were immediate. Time permeance, a snap shot reality. The affects of radiation poisoning and environmental destruction... not so easy to see. A corporation establishes a factory and then kills all of its workers right away.. that would be big news. But if it does it over time, and knows about it... that seems to illicit not as strong a response. A crawling terror still brings with it the painful screams of those who feel its wake.

If we, then, do not value nuclear bombs, these weapons of mass destruction, perhaps we must also look at the processes that have the similar ramifications: suffering on a large scale motivated and caused by a particular intent. The intent to kill or maim or purposefully harm seems pretty unacceptable in most of the world... but why is it that the actually killing and maiming or grave harm is accepted moreso if the intent was self aquisition or the pursuit of wealth or property? Is not, and was not, that the goal of war and has been the goal of all wars?

Warefare is an extension of a society's accepted means of production and economic system. Yet we now live in a world where warfare seems to be not accepted by a majority of persons for 'economic' means- that there must be a 'just cause'... yet we continue to operate and be essentially satisfied with the system that precipiated those wars of aggression for economic means. Furthermore, few people question the established systems existance but because of its existance prior to their being, there seems to be a self-manifested tautology: what exists is existing and therefore should exist. We have a poor sense of time and space, and things that happen gradually, have been well documented as having a greater tolerance to opposition.

Yet I cannot relent in what seems to be simple logic... How could I explain this to my child? If killing people is not ok to do if you are doing it for money, then the 'thing' that created the killers also has some fault with it. The thing is the ideas and speeches and actions of the people working to survive in one way or another. So we try to change it (the system).... yet at the same time, more than what I can tell has occured before, the system- that is to say, capitalism, is being proponed all over. WHY DO WE REJECT THE OUTCOME YET ACCEPT THE CATALYST? Now, I am not foolish to believe that if we just changed our economic system from a privatized to a publicized one solves things.. you simply change the monopoly of power (or oligopoly of power) to another hand. So then, the only recourse that my simple mind can conjure is to either dismantle society and therefore there exists no economic system.. or to make it actually more autonomous and accountable to all persons as a whole. Yet the first path seems to lead only to more destruction... and the second one that may have more sustainability to it. Yet, it can only be done through conscious choice by people ordained with responsibility: all of us. To absolve our own guilt is to only push the dirty laundry farther under the bed.

Remembering the pain and suffering of people is not hard at all... it seems to always be with and around us. The human life, probably more than many other animals, has been marked by probably at least half of us in a state of suffering at any given point in time. Technology has been seen as improving things, and yet, the very key board that I am pecking at had its social cost to it. Luckily I am able to go down memory lane and ponder my thoughts of who and why I am... even though it often makes me a bit somber or sad. And yet still, I cannot help but question what good it really does. Nonetheless, my burden is a blessing.

** The picture is a Salvador Dali painting, his depiction of War... an ongoing horror that is repeated over and over again...