This by Cynthia B. Johnson:

It used to be that humans were more conscious of their mortality. People saw death all around. They killed their own food, hunting and trapping wild life, butchering farm animals for meat – if accident or disease didn’t get to them first. Infirm relatives were tended at home, and bodies laid out in the front parlor for the wake. Consumption, yellow fever, typhoid, and polio, all the limitations of medicine and science reminded people that life is precarious, unpredictable, and hard. But God’s will be done.

Even children sang of death, the ancient memory replayed in every street –

This town has seen more illness and death and loss than it can comprehend. Many nursed friends and lovers through AIDS, through infection after infection, thrush and KS and pneumonia and more. But despite all that death is still something that happens to other people, not to us. And there’s proof – we’re still alive! Whatever our condition, as ill as we might be and whatever our prognosis, we have not taken that one step between existence and oblivion. No matter how many dying people we’ve cared for, how often we watch Dark Victory or Steel Magnolias, however many war movies and cop shows we watch, we have not learned death’s secrets. And as long as that is the case, it will not be real to us. Death will continue to wear someone else’s face. We would rather be the winners, the survivors, even if we feel a little guilty about it.

Nowadays, death is treated as a failure – of will, of science – even of the government. It can be delayed, and often overcome by the right medicines or the hands of a skillful surgeon. We look to research, knowing that with enough money and time, science will surely come up with a cure. We’re angry when they don’t. Hospitals study every death, trying to figure out what went wrong. The government provides the death penalty, but prohibits doctor-assisted suicide. We even blame people for their own illnesses, for bad habits and negative attitudes. It must be someone’s fault. There is no such thing as a "natural death."

Death is often hidden from view, in clean and ornate funeral homes, in hospitals and care facilities. The elderly and infirm are given skilled care in nursing homes, but these often send the dying to hospitals to keep their mortality figures low. Even road kill is quickly removed, the battered animal carcasses whisked from sight.

But I wonder if our power over death, all of our treatments and safety features and regulations have really made life more valuable to us, each soul more precious. Emergency rooms and medical technicians fight for each patient, and we spend millions rescuing hikers and rock climbers from accidents and stupidity. We rally all the resources of technology and sheer bravery, risking the lives of firefighters and swat teams when people are in danger. We recall unsafe products and investigate airplane crashes. And yet we ignore the millions of children and adults living in poverty and danger and illness with the bold cry, "no new taxes." We allow whole populations to be under-educated and underpaid. We do not demand tough environmental laws – or even adherence to the current ones. We are – and I’m talking to myself here, too - inclined to let the government do its thing with very little attention from us. Money talks – but we don’t. We seldom use our power as consumers to confront dehumanizing corporate practices or to ensure social justice. Even here in Provincetown, this one small town, we cannot ensure the most basic affordable housing against property rights and the demands of profit.

"Evil exists," a student in the South Bronx once remarked to Jonathan Kozol. "Somebody has power. Pretending that they don’t so they don’t need to use it to help people – that is my idea of evil." ["Spare us the Cheap Grace," Jonathan Kozol, Time magazine, 12-11-95]

Every one of us makes a choice, every moment, what kind of world we want to live in. We alone choose whether we will be civil and helpful and patient, or petty, selfish, rude. We decide whether to handle our stress, counteract it, or to give in, use it as an excuse. We decide, to a large measure, what we need to be happy, and how much is enough. And we alone can examine our prejudices and assumptions, our attitudes about who counts, who deserves help, and who is expendable.

When we look back on the past – on Jim Crow laws, on our violent history of labor reform, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, it’s easy to decide what side we would have been on, what decision we’d have made. Surely the issues were clear. But Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and sentenced to death by a Unitarian judge not immune to the prejudices of his day. Life was no less complex then, no less distracting and difficult. Who had time to pay attention to the issues?

Fifty-five years ago today the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On a regular day. People were going about their business, buying food for dinner, taking exams, worrying about their children. No one had "Death – all Day" in their plans.

It is no accident that the victims were Asian. Bombing runs in Europe during WW2 were loosely aimed at military and industrial sectors to lessen casualties among German civilians, as hated as they were - and there was plenty of propaganda aimed against Huns and Nazis. But racism had been used to influence attitudes toward the Japanese long before Pearl Harbor and the incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans in relocation camps. After Iwo Jima, Time magazine would state "the ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing…indicates it." [A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn]. The people of Japan were considered alien and evil, the devil’s race, sly and sinister and heathen. Dropping a uranium bomb in the heart of Hiroshima was never necessary – the US had broken their code and knew Japan was preparing to surrender. And Russia had communicated plans to enter the War against Japan on August 8^th. By dropping the bomb on August 6th, the US proved its supreme power as a world leader over Russia and maintained control in the Pacific after the war. And the victims were only Japanese, after all – not like us. As if to reinforce that, a plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki 3 days later.

US citizens were perhaps less aware of their government’s war-time policies than the average German citizens were of theirs. Most only learned of the Japanese relocation camps after the war. They were increasingly appalled about the results of the atomic bombs, even as Truman and the military sought ways to justify their actions. But it was as much the horrifying effects of radiation, the implications of such sheer raw power that stunned them as the real misery and suffering of human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it did not stop them from demonizing the people of the Soviet Union and participating in McCarthy’s communist witch hunts of the 50s. Americans did not use either our experience or our power as citizens in support of true equality or democracy. "The problem after war is with the victor," wrote A.J. Muste. "He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?" [ibid]

No one, apparently. Here’s a list of the countries that the US has dropped bombs on since the end of WW2:

And how many of these bombings resulted in a democratic government, respectful of human rights? Try none. Zero. Not a one. Somehow, bringing them death and destruction and terror did not convince these people that the American form of democracy was a positive help or that our government was interested in their human rights. If there was a humanistic rationale for all this destruction, it was secondary to American business interests and political imperialism. And of all of these primarily third-world countries, only the last, Yugoslavia, has a predominantly white population. I do not think that is at all a coincidence. It is much easier to dismiss people who do not look like you, to believe that their dreams are unimportant, their pain less real, their lives cheap - whether they live around the world, or 2 doors away. You don’t have to be dead not to feel.

Peace is more than an absence of war. It is an attitude of acceptance, of gratitude for life and for being alive with all of its dismal clutter and compromise. And we can only have it if we create it – if we demand justice and mercy and fulfillment for everyone, whether or not they are useful, or productive, or look good, and even if they aren’t like us and don’t like us and never will. It doesn’t matter. Their difference is what makes ours possible. All life is sacred, or none is.

"If the people lead, the leaders will follow." Our governments are certainly not going to change their priorities unless we do. Until we no longer support – by our silent indifference or righteous judgment – policies that keep families homeless and cut spending for the elderly and people with disabilities and that encourage militarism and corporate bail-outs, our legislatures will continue to serve the principalities and powers that do. Our peace will never be real. It will merely be ignorance.

None of us is dead, yet. But to be truly alive, we must live consciously, generously, and responsibly, using our power to change the world. Start with yourself, with your assumptions and values, with how you care. Make courage your tool. But don’t stop there. Don’t stop until you embrace the whole world in your one, brief, majestic life.

William Stafford writes:

Closing Words: by Thornton Wilder