WE CANNOT ESCAPE HISTORY

August 6, 2006; St. John’s Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Frank Carpenter, D.Min.

It is good to be gathered together again in this space. We have not worshipped here for several weeks. Bill Luerssen and his team have taken the opportunity to paint the wall.

It is good to be gathered together. It could be otherwise. We might have continued to worship with our friends at First Unitarian Church.

We have worshipped in other spaces. 100 years ago we worshipped in the great old building downtown near the Music Hall at 12^th and Elm. We left there because of growing fear of attending night meetings in that neighborhood.

We have changed where we worship because of friendship, because of violence. And sometimes just because of change. For many years a number of St. Johners have attended the week of July 4^th at Lake Geneva. But this year was the last, as they now set out on a journey of finding a new home.

It is good to be together this morning. It could have been otherwise.

We gather together this morning to ask what John F. Kennedy’s words of 43 years ago mean today. How do we take up his call to us, that we “should begin by looking inward, by examining [our] own attitude towards the possibilities of peace…” http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html

We gather together this morning for the same reason that all people gather together. In the words of Abraham Lincoln 144 years ago, we cannot escape history. “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We … will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm Whether our names rank with Lincoln or Kennedy doesn’t matter. What matters is what each of us does. This morning we look inward to consider the fiery trial of today, a trial which in so many ways began with the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In Hiroshima, of a resident civilian population of 250 000 it was estimated that 45 000 died on the first day and a further 19 000 during the subsequent four months. In Nagasaki, out of a population of 174 000, 22 000 died on the first day and another 17 000 within four months. http://www.uic.com.au/nip29.htm

In a significant way, these numbers are misleading. Or, they are not the most important numbers. The fire bombings of Dresden in Germany and Tokyo with conventional weapons brought greater devastation. What makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand out, James Carroll wrote in his HOUSE OF WAR, is not the horrific loss of life quite so much as the quickness it took. The firebombing of Dresden took hours upon hours with planes upon planes dropping bombs upon bombs upon bombs. In Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, 45,000 people, mostly elderly, women and children, died in the flash of an eye. They were not pounded into the Stone Age, but incinerated in seconds.

Was it necessary? Aerial bombing of civilians has proved counter productive. During World War II, German productivity increased with aerial bombardment. In Viet Nam more ordnance was dropped than World War II, yet didn’t defeat its victims. And these past few weeks, we see that the aerial bombing of Lebanon has had the opposite of the intended effect.

And yet we continue to shield ourselves behind such weapons. Should we not look inward to consider our attitude to peace?

Ben Cohen was one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. Having sold the company he has taken up a new cause. Recently he was on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS. They talked about the weapons we hid behind.

Tavis began with the remark that “A new report about United States defense spending says that more than sixty billion dollars of your hard-earned tax money is being spent on Cold War-era weapons that are now obsolete. Imagine then if that sixty billion were spent on things, say, like education and health care.” http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200607/20060721_transcript.html

Later in the show, Cohen shares his BB illustration with Smiley. You can go to Cohen’s website, www.truemajority.org to see a video of this. I need to ask you to visualize the BB’s and audioize the sound they make:

Cohn : Here's one BB. That represents the equivalent of fifteen bombs the size of what blew up Hiroshima. Now here's six BBs and that would be enough nuclear weapons to blow up all of Russia. Now what I'm going to do is pour in the amount of BBs that represents our total nuclear arsenal [in the U.S.].

……That was ten thousand BBs, the equivalent of a hundred fifty thousand Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs. I mean, we just don't need that many. Our military advisors say that we could cut our nuclear force down to a reasonable deterrent force and save ten billion dollars a year.

It does not surprise me that Bob Herbert of the New York Times writes a recent op-ed piece entitled “A World gone mad.” His concern is that it seems to have gone almost unnoticed.

Over the past few years, Pakistan has been hard at work building a powerful new plutonium reactor that when completed will be able to produce enough fuel to make 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year. http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/opinion/31herbert.html

Neither Pakistan nor India have signed the Nuclear Non=Proliferation Treaty, yet the United States appears to be fueling an arms race which may include not only India and Pakistan but China as well.

Herbert continues:

John F. Kennedy, in a televised address to the nation in July 1963, said: “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament.”

This August 6, 2006, we are just about at this point.

We Americans have an ambivalent history of violence. Just consider the fiery trial of which President Lincoln spoke in his address to Congress at the end of 1862. Ron Susskind recently remarked during a discussion of his new book, THE ONE PER CENT SOLUTION, that some seem to have an almost mystical belief in the use of force.

We see ambivalence to violence in the career of John f. Kennedy. Kennedy was tough. He ran for president on the alleged ‘missile gap’ between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Critical of Eisenhower, Kennedy said in 1958 on the Senate floor “the fact of the matter is that during that period when emphasis was laid upon our economic strength instead of our military strength, we were losing the decisive years when we could have maintained a lead against the Soviet Union in our missile capability.”

James Carroll reminds us that Kennedy “was elected president because he made us afraid again.” [page 226.]

So what turned Kennedy around? Why did he take the lead with the Test Ban Treaty? Perhaps it was the Cuban Missile Crisis when he and Khrushchev peered over the edge of the abyss and saw what lay there. Many of Kennedy’s advisors called for a military solution. Thankfully both leaders pulled back. If you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, it helped form our attitudes towards peace. Recalling those times, looking inward to our attitudes to peace, will deepen our commitment to peace today.

Kennedy is in part remembered because he sought another path through this thicket. For whatever reason, by the American University Commencement address, he was not taking a simplistic ‘us versus them’ approach to peace. He called us not only to consider the motives and attitudes of the Soviet Union. He also said if we are to find the way to a new peaceful world, we must look at ourselves as well.

But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward, by examining his own attitude towards the possibilities of peace, towards the Soviet Union, towards the course of the cold war and towards freedom and peace here at home.

First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again. I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html

This looking inward is in part a recollection of our experiences that have helped to form our present attitudes. I want to share some of my memories of the nuclear arms race which started 61 years ago.

When I think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the things that comes to my mind is a tourist brochure for Nagasaki from the early 1920’s. I recall looking through it, wondering how much of that city of the 1920’s might remain. The brochure was in my father’s papers, as he had spent two years living in Nagasaki after a physical breakdown following World War I.

I do not remember when I began to put those pieces of my personal life together with the nuclear threat we live under. The earliest memory that I can reasonable date was events during my junior high school years. My mother and I were living in Bangor, ME. A Strategic Air Command – SAC -- air field was the main industry of the city at the time. These were in the days of air raid drills, of which Tom Lehrer sang about. I remember air raid drills at what was then the Garland Street Junior High in Bangor. It’s now called the William Cohen Junior High, after the Unitarian Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Presidency. We were all instructed to crawl under out desks and close our eyes. I recall Tom Lehrer added that we were then to kiss our butt goodbye.

One time the drill included an evacuation of Bangor. We all went up to Orono, the home of the University of Maine and the Penobscot Indians, about 20 miles north. Thousands of us wandered around the University campus and I discovered how much fun it was to drop dry ice into water.

The Cuban Missile Crisis found me in college. Friday nights were always family night, which meant we were served at the tables in the dorm dining room and the tables had white table clothes. On that particular Friday evening, in our talk over dinner, we were all certain we would either be dead the next morning or in uniform

My first church was in a small dairy town in New Hampshire. There were more cows and apple tress then people in the town and Unitarian churches just a few miles away in either direction. It was an idyllic setting and many fascinating people lived there. One of them was a retired Operating Room Nurse. After World War II, she served in the hospital in Hiroshima. She never talked about her work at that hospital, but each Sunday at the small NH church she arranged the flowers. While in Japan, she had learned the art of Japanese flower arrangement.

One of the high points of my social justice efforts was bringing the Nuclear Freeze Campaign to the town. Needless to say, it was a small conservative town, but there were a number of us who organized for the town to vote for the Nuclear Freeze as many communities were doing in the early 1980’s. I can still recall that moment during the Town meeting that year when I had to decide whether to continue to debate the issue, or sit down and be quiet. My intuition told me that if I pushed the debate any further, people who become indignant. I sat down. The vote passed. I can still feel my pride at that moment.

I continue to believe that peace is possible. If people who want to live at peace with one another, if we want our children to inherit a peaceful world, we can join together, and we can make that happen. People working at the local level make the difference. Great armed forces seem less and less able to achieve their objectives. http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=107613

With this in mind, I would like to mention to you that the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center is holding a HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE EVENT this evening. There will be a Candlelight Vigil and Meditation Walk at International Friendship Park on Eastern Avenue just past the Boathouse at 8:45pm. There will be a meditative walk and candle light vigil through the park, past the Hiroshima panels, as we remember all who have lost their lives through nuclear weapons and war.

It is good to be gathered together today. We cannot escape history: so let us consider our own values and attitudes. Thus we may know we are called to be peacemakers