On the Road Again (intermission # 6) Hiroshima Day

Yesterday was August 6. That is a significant date for two reasons. One, it was Hiroshima Day - a day when some people remember the devastation of the first atomic bomb. A small handful of people on Salt Spring Island remembed.

Yesterday afternoon about 15 people gathered in the Peace Park in Ganges for a brief ceremony. The Raging Grannies were there ( although one was missing. She had been a Japanese prisoner of war, and remembers cheering when the prisoners heard about the destruction of Hiroshima. It is not surprising that she would find Hiroshima Day a bit conflicting) plus perhaps 10 other people. The Grannies sang a few songs and then we went around the circle saying why we were here. I  didn't have much to say - except to note the ages of the people present. With the exception of one young man in his early 20s (who was with his grandmother), I think I was the youngest.

I suppose we can't expect younger people to remember the second world war - it was 65 years ago - with any sense of passion or anger. But surly we, those of us of my generation, should have/ could have done a better job of telling them why war was wrong. It seems to me that somehow while people may complain about the war in Afghanistan or Bosnia or where ever, we have accepted that wars will exist. The debate appears to be more frequently about whether or not the war is justified as opposed to the fact that war is wrong.

Wars in the world will only stop when we the people say so. We can stop war by not participating, by not paying taxes or by not electing governments who want to go to war.  But that is only half of the solution. We must also insure that the conditions that allow/encourage war to exist, are eradicated. One of the people at yesterday's little get together said that Canada was spending 17 billion dollars on new jets. 17 billion dollars is about the same amount that it would take to feed and educate all of the people in developing countries.  One has to wonder if feeding and educating folks would not do more to limit war than than buying a few jets.

On a secondary note the Peace Park was in part created to recognize the contributions that people with Japanese heritage made to the development of Salt Spring Island. The irony is of course that all of those families were taken off of the island and sent to the interior during WWII. Most never returned.

The second reason why August 6 is significant is that it is my brother's birthday. Which goes to show that even on a date infamous in history - good things can happen.

On the Road Again (reading notes # 1)

When I travel I usually bring a book or two. Thoreau's writings are always in my bag. His short essays Civil Disobedience and Life without Principle are always worth another read. On other trips I have brought with me the writings of Emerson or Walt Whitman. For this trip I brought for the first time Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract and Discourses.  Rousseau, who was Swiss originally, wrote this body of work just over 250 years ago. I have heard about it, and read articles that discussed it for most of my adult life. I have even discussed it in class ( inappropriately as it turns out). What a wonderful book!! I suspect that I will be reading it again and again for some time in the future.

It is on occasion clear, and quite wonderful. Far more often it is complicated, dense and a bit of a hard slog to get through it. I find myself re-reading the same passages again and again- not too sure what he was trying to say. I wonder sometimes whether or not I have lost some of my reading skills that I nurtured so very carefully just a few years ago. At the very least I am out of practice reading something so intellectual challenging.

But what I have manage to read and hopefully to understand is absolutely brilliant. I had no idea that Rousseau was to much of socialist. Quite before his time. While he approached the distribution of wealth from a different perspective than did Marx - he gets to the same point.We should only have what we need. To own more than that is unequal and unsustainable. Or at least that is what I think he was saying.

More on this in the future.