Barefoot Gen

I value having had the experience of watching this movie, though it's not something I'll probably ever want to do again. (Though I did have a strange urge to watch grave of the Fireflies again). I think something like this is so incredible, so out of the realm of normal human experience that the very idea is almost impossible to grasp except in the abstract for me, or, I imagine, for anyone who has not lived through something similar.

Though the movie seemed a bit documentarish in places (trying a little too hard to introduce all the separate horrors) and melodramatic, there is power in the idea that it's a tale written in the perspective of an individual (and even more so that it's an actual biography). Watching a history channel special is one thing...it's informative, reading eyewitness reports is another, lending some of the horror. Having an experience, even an anime one can impart the feeling a little bit more.

The idea of so much civilian destruction is horrific (though choosing whether soldiers "deserve it" and civilians "are innocent" is another issue I'll leave aside for now) and that is exactly what "The Bomb" presents...it's why the generation before mine saw life as so precarious, knowing that when they did bomb drills in school they were doing pointless preparation for sudden life-ending violence.

So by sharing some of the horror, it can be made more real, emphasize the harshness the bomb represents, hopefully prevent it from being ever used lightly and perhaps from ever being used again. I'm sure I personally still have no idea what it was like and that I take it far too lightly. Still...it doesn't hurt to try educate me and others.

Yet, like the doomsday device (or whatever it was called) in Dr. Strangelove to me it seems actually more inconcievable that such a weapon could exist without eventually being put to use than that the horror of nuclear bombs would not stop them from being used again.

Still, after the two nukes dropped on Japan, some people hope, and I can too that the promise on the Cenotaph at Hiroshima Peace Park holds true:

'Let all souls here rest in peace,
for we shall not repeat the evil'.




http://rosella.apana.org.au/~mlb/cranes/peaceprk.htm