Annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki Remembrance

The annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki Remembrance will, this year, feature a time to apologize for the US nuclear attacks in 1945 and will suggest taking immediate steps toward a nuclear weapon-free world, a nonviolent world.

Recorded on Saturday, Aug. 6, at the west side of the Loose Park Lagoon.

One of the many words for “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” in Japanese is “Shazai,” and our ceremony will incorporate that. We’ll also share information on online petitions, for example, to end the US first-strike policy and extend US response time to a suspected attack instead of keeping our military on first-alert status. Henry Stoever, chair of the PeaceWorks Board, says, “You will have an opportunity to say ‘I’m sorry!’ in writing on various issues, ranging from environmental dangers, to war and weapons and gun violence, to whatever is dear to your heart.”

Ann Suellentrop, a PeaceWorks Board member and one of the planners of the Aug. 6 ceremony, says, “We should turn to each other, not turn on each other.” Ann says that phrase is of old, from early civil-rights-movement days.

Ron Faust, also a PeaceWorks Board member planning the ceremony, says in his poem “If Only an Apology”—

Unless one feels nothing
We are mourning
The massacre of lives
In Hiroshima where
A bomb unleashed the atomic age
And left us with radiation
And apocalyptic destruction

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