it cannot be

I finish The Correspondent on a plane, en route to a cousin’s wedding, blinking back tears, even though I didn’t particularly like Sybil. I think it is because we knew so much about her. Perhaps the same would be true for many people, including myself: that we might not be particularly liked if so many stones were uncovered. Gilbert, Daan, D.M. Still, in the end, I found that I respected her.

At the airport that morning, I had been successful in my goal of purposeful coldness to the ICE agent scanning my id, who had in response told me to, “have a better day.”

I turned this exchange over in my mind. I felt at first strangely bad for my coldness to this man, whose worst harm to my personal self was a touch of condescension. But then I remembered the goals and actions of the agency for which he worked, and the smugness of his wish for my better day, which I do believe he wished me due to a sense of his knowing my disdain for his work, and which I doubt he meant in earnest. I did not feel badly any longer.

Earlier that morning, I had also read a brilliant article about the “Just War” theory and and argument for a more Catholic-inclined preferential option for peace. It suggested that Thomas Aquinas or St Augustine may not have been able to foresee that a war may one day entail the complete and utter annihilation of a people, a complete flattening of a city, in seconds. Drone warfare and nuclear power seem to present a real challenge to legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention.

On the plane, I opened my next book: M.G. Sheftall’s Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses. My mother recommended it, as she has so many formative books over the years. I knew little of war. I began to learn. I read about Kyoto, a contender for the bomb, about the firestorm that consumed Tokyo, about the Manhattan Project.

I read about a convent of young Catholic sisters at Junshin Girls’ school, located in a suburb outside of Nagasaki, as they go about their daily duties in the chapel, or in the nearby Mitsubishi factory. They are 14 and 19 and 21. The girls work long hours and recite daily prayers dutifully, if not sometimes mischievously. I chuckle, knowingly, at their disdain for uniforms and rote repetition. The date is August 9th, 1945.

I have not yet finished the book, but I know how it ends. 216 Junshin Girls died horrible deaths. They were among an estimated 40,000-60,000 who died within seconds of the bomb’s deployment.

I am sitting here now, on Tuesday, April 7th, staring at a tweet made by out very own President of the United States, promising the death of a civilization by 8pm EST.

I would like to imagine in the wars that have preceded my existence that we have operated in good faith under the mistaken framework that our intercession was justified, and that it would bring peace. I would like to imagine that. But I cannot.

This past weekend, I walked through the memorial at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The largest domestic terror attack in US history. Row after row of chairs represented the 168 lives lost. A number of chairs were miniature, to represent the children killed in the bombing. The grass of the playground was maintained to this day. I think about those children, and the hundred-some killed in our latest bombing of an elementary school in Iran.

I walked slowly between the chairs. The memorial is quiet, almost deceptively peaceful. But the shadow of sudden violence stretches across time, literally: the memorial is framed by two large, black walls displaying 9:01, the time before the bombing, and 9:03, the time after.

In Nagasaki, and Oklahoma City, and Lebanon, and Palestine, and Tehran, it is almost cruelly comic: small humans enacting familiar rituals while the universe—or at least the men who claim dominion over it—prepares to flatten them. I imagine Thomas Aquinas scratching his head, scribbling in the margins of “Summa Theologica,” trying to reconcile ethics with this level of human destructiveness. These abstractions feel helpless in the face of real, instantaneous death.

There is no world, no framework, absolutely no justification for the these deaths, nor those in Lebanon or Palestine or Tehran. We have effectively normalized genocide, and the threat of it. We have allowed a despot pedophile war criminal to lead our nation into war after war, straight towards ruin.

I wrote last week in defense of humanity; in its goodness. The goodness that we can participate in, as a friend suggested. This task continues to be daunting. I hope I will not regret my argument in the next four hours.

we have allowed so much 

but it is not too late 

it cannot be. 

I leave us with the words of Pope Francis from his 2020 Fratelli Tutti:

"Every war leaves our world worse than it was before. War is a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a stinging defeat before the forces of evil. Let us not remain mired in theoretical discussions, but touch the wounded flesh of the victims. Let us look once more at all those civilians whose killing was considered “collateral damage”. Let us ask the victims themselves. Let us think of the refugees and displaced, those who suffered the effects of atomic radiation or chemical attacks, the mothers who lost their children, and the boys and girls maimed or deprived of their childhood. Let us hear the true stories of these victims of violence, look at reality through their eyes, and listen with an open heart to the stories they tell. In this way, we will be able to grasp the abyss of evil at the heart of war. Nor will it trouble us to be deemed naive for choosing peace."