“I would rather die than live in fear” -MLK

-Quoted from Alice Walker’s The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart

I came to understand this quote most completely when I watched "White Light, Black Rain" in commemoration of Nuclear Free Future Month through a documentary about the horrors of the the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bombs. I watched the film twice, once at home late sick with the flu, close to my computer screen. The second time I was projecting the image for a group, pulling out themes and facilitating discussion. People's mothers were vaporized, babies lost heads, homes were incinerated. 220,00. They woke up and were living there lives and then they were literally radiated, deeply. A pillar of fire, describes one witness. Not a mushroom cloud. And one of the hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb) lost her whole family except here sister and then her sister killed herself and the only surviving one says, "there are two kinds of courage, the courage to live and the courage to die." I would never have aligned with that claim in the past, not ever seeing a justification for taking your life, or accepting death. And now I see what was meant, what is meant. The bomb makes me so, so, so , sad.