Paul Tibbets passed away today. He is probably the greatest example in human history of how each one of us as an individual rules the world and like it or not is responsible in our own private individual choices and actions for what that world is. Paul Tibbets could have turned left and kept going ..he didn't have to do anything at all that day, no human alive was in a position where they could have stopped him from doing whatever he might choose ..he could have done nothing ..he could have flown his plane down into the ocean ..he could have done any number of things other than what he was told to do.
We all know that someone else would have taken his place and come back another day ..but even that would have given 140,000 plus , family members , children , Mums and Dads ..students with dreams, , young people in love for the first time, and so so many others who happened to be in Hiroshima at 8:15AM that morning a few more days for loving and laughing and caring for each other, for breaking the rules, for learning , for talking, for tasting, for breathing in the air and feeling the suns warmth .. for looking into the eyes of someone they love, even a simple futile attempt at goodness could have given so so many people so many uncountable rich gifts but Paul Tibbets, unfortunately was not a brave man or generous man or a kind man, he was a coward and a small small human being.
We all know that life is unfair but that Paul Tibbets lived into his 90s requires a scope of cruelty that the word unfair just doesn't convey. Paul Tibbets wasn't the only war criminal , he wasn't the only soldier fighting , he wasn't alone in his cruelty and inhumanity and small mindedness, there were Japanese soldiers and other American soldiers of equal merrit but Paul Tibbets made his choice as a free human being who was born with the freedom to choose as we all have been. He could have just turned the plane left and flown home instead.
We can hope for Paul Tibbets that there is no God, ..or maybe we can't.
In the name of the memory of Paul Tibbets and in the name of the awareness that many others like him are alive and well today please sign up for peace http://www.namesforpeace.com
Friday, November 2, 2007
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3 comments:
It helps for readers to know that Paul Tibbets was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force, best known for being the pilot of the Enola Gay, the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb.
I can't imagine being this man, of being an intregal part in the destruction of so many, to then live to 90 with that on his conscious...
One would think that govt.s would have learnt...im afraid not
Thank you for your comments! Your right a little information about who he is might have helped ;)
I can't imagine being that man either or the weight of what he did. I realize that the times were different and the context was different but in any time we make our choices and I am not entirely unsympathetic until I think of all those people. We have to eliminate the concept of Enemy ( US and Them ) it is used too often by governments to create unification and the result has always been war.
Keep up the good work.
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