Summer is often a season of lightness and happy stories, but my summer has been a bit more focused on horrible experiences. It started with watching a few PBS and BBC documentaries about World War II. They were commemorating the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. But before peace could be celebrated, there was a focus on battles and bloodshed and concentration camps and inhumane cruelty and awful things done to the human body. As awful as these accounts are to read or watch, I get satisfaction in knowing that these events and stories are not forgotten and perhaps that is why I watched. The Holocaust is such a frightening period of history – how could humans treat others so inhumanely? I still cannot fully grasp the strength of hatred or intolerance that allows the torture and starvation of other people to happen.
The eighth book on my reading list this year was Hiroshima by reporter John Hersey. It was written in 1946, a year after the atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book (a re-read for me), which is based on an article written by the author that was published in The New Yorker, follows six people who lived through the bombing – two clergymen, two physicians, a mother with young children, and a young woman who worked in a factory. Their experiences provided a personal look at the use of this new weapon of mass destruction. The book is not about the reasons for using the atomic bomb on a city, nor does it discuss the why it was developed or the decision-making processes of leaders in charge. This short book was meant to be a snapshot in time of six people chosen … well, we don’t really know why these specific people were chosen. The book is not really a story but presents snippets of these lives in the months after the bombing, and then one-year later, and an added chapter has a 40-year followup account. It’s not meant to persuade or to delve into their personal lives but to report what happened to them and what they saw. In that regard, it was both illuminating and a bit disappointing.
The third set of images I viewed this summer was related to the 40th anniversary of Live Aid. I went to the 1985 Live Aid concert in Philadelphia with college friends. It was exciting and amazing and quite an adventure. While some of the focus lately has been on the artists who participated in the concerts, seeing the images of starving people in Ethiopia once again has been another grim experience. Bob Geldof’s question about how we can allow millions of people to starve in a world of plenty is still one in our headlines today – see any story about Gaza for starters. I don’t have an answer to his question but it’s sadly as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. Whether the Live Aid (and later Live 8) efforts were as effective as they could have been is less important than the fact that people came together to try to make things better. If we stop prioritizing compassion and fighting for justice and we allow ourselves to give in to cynicism or indifference, we all lose.
