2016 Whig Standard
'Magical quality' to evening of peace
By Julia Balakrishnan August 5th, 2016 (Link to original)

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On Saturday, Kingston will be hosting events not in celebration, but in remembrance and reflection, on the same day American atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The Hiroshima Day Coalition — a collaboration of organizations PeaceQuest, Amherst International, and the Sisters of Providence — are hosting a peace lantern ceremony, as they have for the past 30 years, in McBurney Park at 7 p.m.
Preceding the ceremony will be an interfaith peace walk, which last year attracted 50 participants. The walk is open to those of all faiths and philosophies, spiritual and secular and will be starting at 6:30 p.m. at City Park and end at McBurney Park for the lantern ceremony.
Jolene Simko, administrative co-ordinator of PeaceQuest, describes it as a "silent walk for contemplation," although the silence is optional. This year, the Kingston Stilters are participating, and will be making the walk on stilts, a circus act transformed to suit the serious tone of the evening.
"The purpose of the walk is to add additional meditative opportunity. The walk creates a space for folks who wish to express how they feel about Hiroshima and work toward an atomic, nuclear-free world," Simko said.
Simko said the walk’s focus on inclusion comes from a notion that people have "much more in common than there are differences."
"We all have a desire to live in a peaceful world, and we all would benefit from a society free of violence," she said.
"Every time a community gets together to express common values, it strengthens those values. We could have events highlighting our pride and our prowess on the battlefield, but that sends a certain message that may be more harmful than we realize."
The peace ceremony will feature crafts, origami, live music, storytelling and of course the making and lighting of peace lanterns at dusk.
There will also be immersive slideshows of the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — content recommended only for adults — and an interview with Julie Salverson, a drama professor at Queen’s who is releasing a book titled Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir in September.
Lines of Flight follows the atomic highway and makes a very real Canadian connection with the detonation of the atomic bombs, particularly with a focus on the mining of uranium in the Arctic regions of Canada. It will be one of the featured titles at Kingston Writersfest.
"Sometimes when we have these big world issues so far away, it seems distant from our everyday lives," explained Hiroshima Day Coalition organizer Wendy Perkins. "[Salverson] sends a powerful message for all of us on how to connect with them on a personal level."
At 6:30 in McBurney Park, there will also be a drum circle hosted by Yessica Rivera Belsham and Kyoka Ogoda, as well as tai chi classes and an opening chant.
At the end of the ceremony, each individually made lantern will be set to float in the park’s pool.
"If someone told me that they were floating lanterns in a kiddie pool, I would be skeptical," noted Perkins, "but it’s not like you’d expect. There’s a certain magical quality to the evening that’s quite moving."
The interfaith peace walk will begin in City Park at 6:30, and the drum circle will begin in McBurney Park at the same time. The lantern ceremony will begin at 7 p.m.
2015 Whig Standard
Hiroshima Bombing Remembered
2014 Whig Standard
burned or poisoned by the atom bomb
Kingston has long commemorated Hiroshima Day with an evening ceremony. Lately people have gathered beneath the century-old silver maples at Skeleton Park. They fashion origami peace cranes, listening to poetry and music. As darkness falls. They float tiny paper boats carrying candles that flicker across the water of the wading pool.
"This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world."
Participants repeat these 12 simple words in numerous languages. They've been borrowed from a plaque on the statue of Sadako Sasaki that stands at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Sadako was a 12-year-old girl killed by what her mother called "atom bomb disease."
Sadako believed that your wish would be granted if you folded a thousand paper cranes. She didn't survive to complete the task, so her friends did and the cranes were buried with her. For years, paper cranes have been a symbolic staple of commemorations marking the 135,000 people vaporized, burned or poisoned that terrible day.
This year, when the Aug. 6 ceremony unfolds at Kingston's former "common burial ground," it will coincide with another grim anniversary. A hundred years ago, on Aug. 4, 1914, Britain entered the First World War, dragging Canada into an industrialized slaughter of unimaginable scale.
Some 66,000 Canadians perished. Countless others suffered lasting physical and spiritual scars. Untold millions -- soldiers and civilians -- perished in Flanders and on the Somme. They also died in other imperial wars in the Balkans, Iraq and Africa that gave rise to WW I. And followed it.
How will the "Great War" (as it was called until the next world war broke out) be commemorated here in Canada?
Will we tell a story of the dignity of arms? An enthusiastic rush to the colours? Heroic sacrifice? How often will we hear repeated the deeply flawed, simplistic tale that the carnage somehow marked the birth of a nation?
Or will we set aside what Pierre Berton, that pre-eminent popularizer of Canadian history, lamented as "Vimy fever"?
When we reject the nation-forged-in-fire narrative, we're joining people in Flanders and the Somme who overwhelmingly commemorate a war that ravaged their homes by "remembering for peace?"
Hoping to find out more about WW I commemoration as I was starting work on a book about the war's Canadian legacy, I visited Vimy Ridge and other battlefields in France and Belgium this spring. I learned that, along with the killing fields on which so many soldiers fought and died, memory itself is contested terrain.
At the ceremony marking the 97th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, I listened to Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino speaking about the glorious legacy of war.
"The battlefields of Vimy were, in many ways, the birth of a nation, where Canada became recognized as a powerful force for peace and freedom."
Notwithstanding a unilingual English speech by a Canadian minister on French soil, I was struck by three other contradictions as I stood beneath Walter Allward's soaring Vimy Memorial.
Allward's magnificent monument has no tale of glory to tell. Along with the names of the dead, it features statues of women in mourning. The most prominent is "Canada Bereft," also known as "Mother Canada." This grief-stricken figure stares out over the green fields of France.
And, while the destruction of the weapons of war is virtually unknown in such monuments, Canada's most famous war memorial features The Breaking of the Sword, representing peace and the end of militarism. The original plan proposed a German coal scuttle helmet being crushed underfoot. But Allward, profoundly affected by the disgust with the mad orgy of slaughter that was so common in the 1920s and 1930s, rejected that image as "too militaristic."
I noticed another paradox when Mr. Fantino predictably invoked the Birth of a Nation mythology. Which nation? Vimy and the war in general threatened Canadian unity, with the conscription crisis fracturing Canada along English-French lines. I counted 40 Taylors and a single Tremblay among the alphabetized names chiselled into the base of the Vimy Memorial.
And lest we forget the pungent postwar description of Quebecers by one of English Canada's most influential journalistic pundits, J.W.Dafoe. While the Winnipeg editor described Vimy Ridge as "holy ground" on which men "by the tens of thousands died for mankind," he also labelled French Canadians "the only white race of quitters."
Finally, there's the bizarre notion that WW I had anything at all to do with "peace and freedom." It was a tragedy, pure and simple. A war fought between rival power blocs, sparked in good measure by rivalry over the corpse of a decaying Ottoman Empire in "a world still largely organized around hereditary monarchy."
I came across that observation in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Cambridge historian Christopher Clark's magisterial 2012 book that has emerged as the definitive analysis of WW I origins. Prof. Clark notes dryly that, in the run-up to 1914, the British were worried about "the prospect of the Germans acquiring privileged access to the oil fields of Ottoman Iraq."
As we remember the centenary of the Great War's beginning -- and as we mark its many tragic anniversaries over the next four years -- let's put aside any notions of the nobility of martial sacrifice. Or the glory of war.
Let's instead ponder the remembrance message of Hiroshima Day, Aug. 6.
A couple of years ago, as I watched the tiny lights float across the water in Skeleton Park, I noticed the signs adorning the wading pool fence: "We remember" in English and Japanese. "Bikes Not Bombs." And a variation on an old disarmament slogan: "War is inevitable, says the pessimist. War is impossible, says the optimist. War is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realist."
I also noticed a middle-aged woman (why are such gatherings so often comprised mostly of women?) standing at the back of the gathering. She was wearing a yellow ribbon around her neck.
But it didn't say "Support our troops." Nor was the ribbon complete. Instead, it was in the shape of the familiar "?"
It read Question War.
2009 Whig Standard Letter to the Editor
Hiroshima Day held to send a message to governments
Re: Terence Cottrell's column "Remembering Nanking: Peaceniks aren't telling whole story" (Aug. 14). It
is amazing that this insightful, talented writer could have missed the
point of the Hiroshima remembrance ceremony on Aug. 6 in Confederation
Park.
I believe Cottrell is saying that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 should be seen in the context of the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese citizens of Nanking in 1937.
Lots of bad things happened in the 1930s and 1940s. The German Nazis opened the first concentration camp in 1933. In the pastoral countryside near Munich, Dachau became the death camp for gypsies, Jews and dissident priests and ministers.
Here in Canada, Christian Brothers beat and molested young boys in religious schools. We later found out that the state-supported so-called reform schools were really punishment prisons for children. We still use the term "bastard" for someone we don't like. In the 1930s, it was a common term for any child whose parents were not legally married.
The point of remembering Hiroshima and the bomb is to remind us of the power of this particular weapon. In the 1940s, most of us thought of the atomic bomb as just another big weapon. X-rays and the resulting radiation, we believed, were benign tools to set broken bones. Shoestores had little X-ray machines on the floor. You slid your foot in when wearing new shoes so you could see if the bones lined up with the shoe size.
It was later that we learned that death by radiation loosed from an airplane above the clouds that we couldn't even see doesn't take sides in a war. Global warming and air and water pollution are fixable with enough political will. Death and sickness from even a few atomic bombs are irreversible, and that is why we remember Hiroshima -- to tell governments around the world to say to their militaries "Never again," before it is too late.
Janet C. Miller Kingston
I believe Cottrell is saying that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 should be seen in the context of the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese citizens of Nanking in 1937.
Lots of bad things happened in the 1930s and 1940s. The German Nazis opened the first concentration camp in 1933. In the pastoral countryside near Munich, Dachau became the death camp for gypsies, Jews and dissident priests and ministers.
Here in Canada, Christian Brothers beat and molested young boys in religious schools. We later found out that the state-supported so-called reform schools were really punishment prisons for children. We still use the term "bastard" for someone we don't like. In the 1930s, it was a common term for any child whose parents were not legally married.
The point of remembering Hiroshima and the bomb is to remind us of the power of this particular weapon. In the 1940s, most of us thought of the atomic bomb as just another big weapon. X-rays and the resulting radiation, we believed, were benign tools to set broken bones. Shoestores had little X-ray machines on the floor. You slid your foot in when wearing new shoes so you could see if the bones lined up with the shoe size.
It was later that we learned that death by radiation loosed from an airplane above the clouds that we couldn't even see doesn't take sides in a war. Global warming and air and water pollution are fixable with enough political will. Death and sickness from even a few atomic bombs are irreversible, and that is why we remember Hiroshima -- to tell governments around the world to say to their militaries "Never again," before it is too late.
Janet C. Miller Kingston
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