Honoring the bomb
In 1945, the people of Richland, Washington finally learned what their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons had been working on for the last two years. It wasn't poison gas or jellied gasoline bombs after all. It was something better, it was Fat Man, the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, or more accurately, the plutonium which gave Fat Man the power to vaporize thousands.
The people were so proud of what their labor accomplished that they changed the name of their high school mascot. No longer would they be known as the Beavers, they were now the Richland Bombers. Their new logo featured a mushroom cloud, the new symbol of American potency.
Over the years, liberals tried to dishonor the bomb. They said that maybe the mascot should be changed. Perhaps nuclear weapons production wasn't something to celebrate. There were the cancers, the birth defects, and the chronic illness suffered by many in the community. There were the
experiments where radionuclides were released from the processing stacks to learn how far away processing plants could be detected. And, there were the tens of thousands of Nagasaki dead. Of course these Soviet enablers never mentioned that all of this was the price we must pay for freedom. It was the bomb that made our nation great, It was the bomb that suckled the community. It provided bread and beer and pickup trucks and hegemony. It is what gives us meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We'll try dumping haloscan and see how it works.