Sixty one years ago the human race left behind the unconscious cruelty of children to demonstrate a studied and mature capacity for evil. Seventy five thousand lives were snuffed out in an instant, and as many again died more slowly and horribly over the years. This was the penultimate act in a grinding tragedy which had already killed 62 million people, and at the same time proof that our destructive impulses had now produced the capacity for collective suicide.
We have the capacity to understand, to communicate, to have compassion for the needs and suffering of our fellows. We live in a world of such awesome beauty that the simplest falling leaf or breaking wave can overwhelm the senses. To look into the human heart is to see the divine made joyously manifest, as anyone who has played with a child or gazed into their lover’s eyes must know.
Still we seem so shrivelled by fear, and so driven by pain and desire, that we make hell out of paradise. Sixty one years after losing our innocence it has become clear that we have never needed wisdom so badly, a quality surely not to be found in the power obsessed plutocracies who rule us.
Everything is possible and yet nothing can be done, until each soldier lays down his arms, disobeys his orders, loves his enemies. We have seen the destroyer of worlds, but we are each our future’s creator.