Why do I insist on mentioning this, each year?
Not because I particularly wish to warn against nuclear weapons. That moment is long past.
Nor because I wish to continue emphasising a particular act of war (amongst many) from sixty four years ago.
Because it is an occasion to remember that we have gone on creating and using ever more effective ways to kill civilians. A good occasion to think about napalm, perhaps. Or the many Iraqi civilian deaths (something like a hundred thousand so far) which we ignore as we note on our television screens only the relatively tiny numbers of our own military losses. Or those in the ongoing mess which is Palestine.
And perhaps also the deaths by negligence while we pour funding into means of killing. Like the nearly ten million children under age five who die every year from causes which we could prevent by diverting just a small fraction of our military spending.
That's why I insist on mentioning Hiroshima Day.
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