Seventy-five Years Ago Today

Karma is a bitch, they say. Karma, as everyone knows, is the concept of, ‘You reap what you sow.’ If you commit a bad deed, sometime in the future a commensurate bad thing is visited upon you, like a vengeance boomerang.

This may work in morality tales and fables, proverbs and anecdotes, and admonitions from parents to naughty children to ‘do what’s right,’ but in the real world things are not like that. Bad people get away with, indeed, are rewarded for, bad actions and bad things happen to good people all the time.

The four thousand year old Sumerian story of Job, which found its way into Semitic folklore and later the Hebrew Bible, is the oldest know literature dealing with this moral dilemma. Job was a righteous man, honest elder of the village, good husband and father, shrewd and wealthy business man, and beloved of God. Why did shit happen to him? The answer? Because.

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15AM, Japan time, the second atomic bomb ever made, with a force equal to fifteen thousand tons of TNN in a little package obscenely called ‘Little Boy,’ exploded in the air over the Japanese city of Hiroshima instantly vaporizing 80,000 civilians. In some places, shadows were left on the streets and walls as their owners absorbed the radiation of the blast and melted. An eerie dome, half destroyed, stood at the cruel eye of the blast: A silent witness.

“The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.

If resort is had to this form of inhuman barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives. I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents. I request an immediate reply.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

September 1, 1939, to the allied nations.

Poor Franklin. Did no one ever tell him that all’s fair in love and war? But back to karma.

Karma is not a moral transaction; it is an attribute of the psyche. We refrain from evil deeds, not for some moral high ground or to impress some vindictive deity, we do what’s right because to do otherwise pollutes our own soul, that of our society, that of our children, and that of the society which is to come. Karma is patient. We do so because we don’t want to do worse; worse as an individual man or woman, worse as a government, worse as a player on the world stage, and worse as a society where the whole reflects the actions of its parts. We do so lest there comes a time where, ‘Every civilized man and woman is no longer profoundly shocked’ by atrocities. We cannot escape the claws of history.

It’s seventy-five years later. What have we become?