200,000 times - Living Humanism - Brief Article - Editorial

I owe my life to the atomic bomb.

I don't know that I would say I'm grateful, though. It's hard to be grateful for one's own life when others had to be sacrificed for it. While my grandfather, a Taiwanese student at the Nagasaki Medical University, lived through August 9, 1945--the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki--his first wife and their two children did not. When he returned home to Taiwan he eventually married my grandmother and had four more children, the youngest of whom is my mother.

The bombing kindles within me a crisis. It's not fair that my grandfather's first family had to die to make way for me to live. They, too, had lives to live--lives perhaps so vibrant that nothing short of nuclear fission would extinguish them. That tiresome page of Chinese characters demanding calligraphy practice, that half-pound of pork for the evening's dinner--unfinished, unbought. Their neighbors in Nagasaki never did deliver all the newspapers or sell all of that day's catch, so fresh from the ocean that the market air hung heavy with the odor of sea salt that morning. Don't tell them that there was a war going on--that the United States had to bomb them, as if annihilating 70,000 people and a prosperous port city were an obligation. Don't protest, "Pearl Harbor: 2,400 dead!" for they may answer you, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: over 200,000 dead!"

Over 200,000 dead. I often chide myself for my irreverence toward those 200,000 who died that day. Ashamed as I am to admit it, in a way I'm sort of glad the bombing happened. How could I not be? Had my grandfather's first family not died, had the United States not dropped the atomic bomb on them, my mother would never have been born and neither would I. And I know so well that I have no right to sulk and complain about that worksheet due for art history class tomorrow morning while those 200,000 dead are so gravely silent about their grievances--which must, I would think, be many. Why am I so caught up in all those petty things that don't matter at all in the big picture: those little bouts of stress; those damp, rainy days; those short-lived spats with friends and siblings? Just be glad to be alive, Doris. Don't be so spoiled!

And I get so angry at myself, frustrated that the big picture, which unifies our life and experiences and makes everything worthwhile, eludes my sight. I battle with tremendous concepts of life and death, virtue and sin, but somehow I can't seem to grasp the point here.

At least, not until I came across a thought-provoking line in Thornton Wilder's Our Town: "You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life." I know of at least 200,000 people who can no longer love life because they no longer have life. Imagine everything in their lives that went unfulfilled.

And then I realize that it's not what we do in life or where we go or even who we know. It's how. How do we go about doing what we do and going where we go and knowing who we know? How much of ourselves do we pour into our lives--into things, tasks, ideas, hopes, wishes, stars and clouds, places, and each other? When we say, "Good morning," do we say it with a brilliant smile and unshakable conviction, or do we mechanically spout a mindless little phrase? Do we jog or do we run? Do we smile or do we beam? Do we work or do we strive? Do we wish or do we dare?

And suddenly I see the solution to my crisis. It is a great shame that these victims had their love of life cut short. But I can honor them by remembering that I myself have to "love life to have life and have life to love life." If I show everyone I encounter how much I love life, maybe I can inspire in them the sort of love for life that the people of Nagasaki inspired in me. It's a matter of working 200,000 times harder, loving 200,000 times more deeply, and dreaming 200,000 times bigger.

I don't think it will be necessary, though, for me to cry 200,000 times harder. They already did that for me.

Doris Huang of Los Altos, California, is now eighteen years old. This essay received honorable mention in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2001 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America.

COPYRIGHT 2002 American Humanist Association
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