Monday, January 25, 2010

Stay Black and Proud...except for you.

Don't ask me why, but for some reason I was convinced to attend a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I'd avoided the NAACP because of a run in with an NAACP official several years ago at one of their conventions. He was a person of note and I attempted to shake his hand at which point he looked at me as if I were begging him for change. I noticed him posing for photos with various people at the event at which I met him and when I attempted to get a photo with him I was treated as if I'd just crawled from a septic tank. I left feeling insulted and the following day I saw the same man who had rebuffed me nearly in tears because members of MY generation weren't joining the NAACP in the numbers we once were during the 50's, 60's and 70's. I wanted to reach into my television pull the negro through it and beat him until his mother didn't recognize him for this hypocrisy.

Regardless, I was attending an NAACP meeting. The turn out was small and the bulk of the membership were men and women in their late 50s and early 60s. There were a handful of people my age, but not many. The new people were asked to give their names and say somethin about themselves and when my turn came I said who I was and said what I do during the day to pay the bills. I thought nothing of it, but when the meeting concluded I found myself being told that the NAACP's national convention would be in our city and that I of all people should come up with an idea for a business that I could shop around to some of the well connected persons who might show up.
Another older member told me that I would "find my nitch" at some point. Mind you my day job doesn't have a pension or benefits, but it's nice to know that members of my parents generation could easily overlook the fact that I:

a. Wasn't in jail
b. wasn't breaking the LAW to support myself.
c. HAD A JOB!

yet they were wondering why I and other members of my generation weren't rushing out in DROVES to join them. In the parking lot one of the older members whom initially thought was okay took issue with the fact that one of the chapter's officers was white. He went on some drawn out racist tirade about how black organizations don't need white members etc and peppered his sentiments with a plethora of racial slurs.
He then got on me when he learned that one of my closest friends is Asian by saying how my generation has so alienated itself that we have to look to "other races" because we can't befriend one another.

I know the people I met are not the ENTIRE NAACP, but at the same time I was thinking that this cross sampling reminded me why I hadn't joined the organization in the first place. I'm not saying they don't do any good. The organization was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and many of the rights I take for granted today were secured by NAACP lawyers like Thurgood Marshall, but today's NAACP needs to find leadership that looks at today's issues rather than celebrating it's glorious past and try to appeal to men and women whose generational outlook is more in keeping with the new millineum and the problems that we (Americans of every race) will have to solve.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Legacy of the Little Boy

A fair amount of time had elapsed from 8:15am August 6 1945 to a cold, late December afternoon in 2009 when a 40 year old, dredlocked, American former Marine got off a trolley in Hiroshima clad in an old field jacket. Armed with a digital camera, his mission was to capture a piece of history.
When one stands before the "peace dome" one can't help but think that mere yards away the bomb produced by the Manhattan project which was jokingly named "little boy" was dropped by the Enola Gay and detonated 600 meters above and changed not only the city of Hiroshima, but the entire world.
Co-pilot Captain Robert A. Lewis wrote in the Enola Gay's log after seeing the mushroom cloud "My God...what have we done."

The Peace Dome was one of the handful of buildings which survived when Hiroshima and the bulk of her inhabitants evaporated on that hot August morning. As a hard wind whipped your humble narrator's locks from the back of his head to his face he stood there attempting to take a photo of the building around which the present day city of Hiroshima seemed to have been rebuilt.

I stood there as my cold fingers fumbled with the buttons on my camera attempting to photograph a building which had been seen by the entire world in the 69 years since the bombing. Tears streamed down my face as I took photo after photo and thought of the men, women and children who never knew the bomb was coming and died instantly.
I thought about those who survived only to die shortly afterwards and those who survived and suffered from radiation related illnesses for the remainder of their lives.
As I ventured through the park and to the peace museum itself I saw a disclaimer from the Japanese government which said essentially that the purpose of the museum was not to place blame on the United States and how Japan's Emperial policies and it's attack on the United States meant that they could not claim to be innocent victims. The purpose of the musem was simply to show the world the consequences of war and how the losers always out number the winners.
I thought of the American, British & Australian soldiers, sailors and Marines who died at places like Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Battan and Wake Island. I thought of the Chinese butchered at Nanking, the Korean & Chinese "Comfort women" forced into prostitution to service the Japanese military and the countless Japanese civilians who died in American bombings.
Wars are started by old men, fought by young ones, but suffered by entire populations. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that a million American servicemen would have lost their lives in an attempt to invade Japan and no one is quite sure how many Japanese civilians and military would have been lost.

The bomb had been called a "nessasary evil" but as one stands in the shadow of the peace dome, one can't help but wonder HAVE we learned anything from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The bombs in the world's nuclear arsenals destroy 10,000 times more "efficiently" than little boy and fat man did. We are just as likely now to engage in armed conflict as we EVER were and truthfully there are many who can't see beyond nationalistic furor which blinds them from seeing the citizens of a country which his own has declared "the enemy" as human.

At the end of the day as I stared out the window of an okonomiyaki restaurant on the other side of a narrow street from the peace dome, all of this ran through my tired mind. How many "peace domes" will the world know 69 years hence?