#would it be considered disrespectful if i tagged this “hiroshima” and “nagasaki”?

[ashtraygrrrl]

i started wrtiting a longer post about this, but i just wanted to get to this point so ill just make a smaller post for it.

after watching oppenheimer and bawling my eyes out unexpectedly at its end, i started thinking about something. we, all of us, in the world, know what happened during Hiroshima and Nagasaki. we are aware of the number of lives lost and people in pain, both physical and emotional, because of it. but we have it in the back of our minds. we are able to discuss it "objectively" because we can keep the awareness of this pain in the back of our minds. and that is a good thing; we shouldn't have to feel pain for something we are not responsible for every time we discuss it in politics or history.

still, if we think about it too much, we do feel the pain, because we are empathetic beings, and we have all lost someone, so, to varying degrees, we can imagine the amount of pain the relatives of the people in those cities, or overall japanese people, felt during and after the events.

it is a thing that weighs upon our collective consciousness. even if we weren't its perpetrators and we feel no guilt whatsoever over it, the amount of pain is so large, that if we think about it too much, if we think of the victims and their relatives as individuals, families, lovers, who were apart for one or another reason, we can imagine the pain. i cannot empathise with the phrase "a hundred thousand people killed", but i can with "a father was on a work trip when he heard the news, and he suddenly knew he didn't have children anymore". that hurts. it aches, and that's why we would rather speak in numbers; because we can detach ourselves from the human beings who lost their lives or loves. and again, that's okay, we do this with so many other things because if we stopped and felt for every tragedy ever, we would lose all faith in humanity, and we would hurt endlessly, but it is good to think about the individual victims of these events sometimes, so that we do not forget the reality of the world, the scope of what they went through, of what humanity's been through.

i don't know, perhaps im an ~empath, but i experience it like that.