Citizenship for our sanity and safety, Part 2
Several months ago, I learned about John Hersey’s epic essay, “Hiroshima.” Hersey, a reporter in Japan between 1945-1946, interviewed several survivors of the atomic bombing. His magnificent essay appeared in the August 31, 1946 issue of the New Yorker, and was the focus of the entire issue. In typical New Yorker practice, the cheerful cover (illustrated by Charles E. Martin), gives no hint to what is in the following pages. Published just over a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey’s essay bore witness to the instantaneous deaths of more than 100,000 men, women and children, and the nightmarish hell the survivors navigated in the hours and weeks after the bombing.
I’m not sure when I learned about Hersey’s essay, but as soon as I did, I filed it away for when I knew I would have a couple uninterrupted hours to read it (yes, it takes that long; the essay is also a 160 page short book that’s been in print for decades). You can read it on the New Yorker website.
On a recent bus ride from Cincinnati to Chicago, I finally got around to reading it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more moving account of anything in my life, from the small graces most of us possess, to the way we harden our hearts and close our ears and eyes to others suffering more than us, to the way we traverse all the emotions in between in about five minutes. And yet, this is not any ordinary backdrop: it is a story in which a woman’s skin comes off her hand like a glove, in which men’s eyes have melted out of their sockets, in which a woman carries her dead baby for four days hoping her missing husband will be able to see them before the cremation. It is a story that is anything but universal, because less than 200,000 people are still living today who have ever witnessed being so close to the heat of the sun. Every day we run the risk that an accident could go terribly wrong, or men could become terribly vindictive. The tally of 200,000 witnesses could grow by several zeroes in an instant.
But today, only 0.00002% of the world’s population can tell you what it was like to live through cruelest human experiment ever conducted by science’s most brilliant minds.
A few days after I read “Hiroshima,” news broke that John Bolton is going to be the new national security advisor. The Bush administration was bad enough, but bringing back the greatest villains from those terrible eight years is just too much. Bolton is a batshit madman who is the living embodiment of “some men just want to watch the world burn.” And a week later, we were bombing Syria because Trump felt like he had to back up his bombastic tweets with military action (and I felt more secure than ever that I made the right decision to leave Twitter, given its role as a platform for war-mongering).
Last year, I felt that my rights were hanging on by the thinnest of threads. I still feel that way, but I’ve also been mentally preparing myself for what I’ll do if and when the worst happens with the judiciary destroying everything I hold dear. But lately, at annual events like family holidays or professional conferences, I have a fleeting thought that whispers around the edges. I wonder if something so unspeakably bad will happen, plunging our country into some kind of civil war, that it would prevent us from gathering together again next year.
Going back and reading what I wrote last year, it’s clear I’m struggling to define and come to terms with ideas of citizenship and patriotism. They are concepts often profoundly opposed to one another. Although citizenship is far too often constructed as state-sanctioned legal residence, I’ve begun to appreciate that citizenship encompasses a much more holistic set of experiences than patriotism. One can be a citizen of a state, a city, their neighborhood, their nation, or the planet Earth. Citizenship implies personhood and identity (often in multiple instances), but patriotism implies a certain set of practices oriented around principles of defense. Citizenship is a concept that, in my mind, transcends boundaries and can exist within a borderless world. But patriotism is inherently bound up in the idea of the nation-state (you wouldn’t say your neighbor who picks up the litter in your neighborhood is a good patriot, but you would likely say they are a good citizen). And the geographically-bounded notion of patriotism and the nation-state is where patriotism begins to break down for me.
Historian Christian Appy has said “patriotism means never having to say you’re sorry.” After I read Hersey’s essay, I read a little bit about how it was received at the time. Apparently many people read it and wanted to know how much the victims of the bombings blamed Americans, and many were relieved to learn that many of the victims did not blame Americans. I guess discourse about collective trauma, responsibility, truth and reconciliation have come a long way since then, but it’s still a telling clue to how guilt is the essential magnetic force that orients our moral compasses.
When you remove a sense of guilt, you remove an obligation to apologize. Guilt and patriotism do not easily coexist. So instead we tell ourselves that the ends justify the means, that incinerating hundreds of thousands of people who don’t look like us is always a justifiable cost to spare American lives. That having the misfortune to be born in the wrong place in the wrong time in history on the wrong side of America means that you’ll never get an apology when our country fucks up. Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place decades ago, but similar body counts from the insistence on protecting American lives at any cost are still with us.
We are told by our parents at a young age to say we’re sorry when we hurt someone, but when we acquire the means to the most anodyne deadly weapon most of us have – a car – the advice changes. Insurance companies say, “Do not discuss whose fault it was (even saying “I’m sorry” may be considered an admission).” Lawyers and insurance companies advise us that if we screw up, if we hurt someone, if we hit a car, that we should not apologize. Because to apologize would be to admit guilt. And admitting something can be used against you.
It’s no wonder that saying sorry does not come easily to us, and that we cloak our refusal to say we’re sorry under a thicket of legal excuses and justification. It’s not just the US government. It’s our entire culture.
Categorised as: life