Of Nuclear Warheads and Suicide Bombers

With this post I will effectively annihilate any future chance I have of becoming involved in American politics.  

The other day I was thinking about nuclear weapons.  And instead of pondering how soon they will be falling upon my city and my subsequent contingency plans (As is my usual custom), my brain turned to ethics.  I wondered why the United States was never tried for war crimes after dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  On August 6th and 9th, 1945 two bombs were dropped in two cities, killing 80,000 people in Hiroshima (140,000 total counting radiation related deaths) and 74,000 people in Nagasaki (A couple of hundred thousand more due to radiation) effectively ending the war.  

I understand that death tolls of this sort are nothing new in modern warfare and that conventionally firebombing Tokyo itself caused around 100,000 civilian deaths.  Yet I pause when I consider the calculation that must have gone into this momentous bombing and the foreknowledge that hundreds of thousands of civilians would die.

At first I wondered if this event would fall under genocide.  Surely there have been those even in recent history who have been prosecuted for rounding up civilians and killing them in a time of war such as in Kosovo and Bosnia.  Yet after talking to my brother, we decided that the atomic blasts would not meet the definition of genocide because they were not targeted at eradicating a certain ethnic group simply because they were Japanese, but because they were at war with us.  (I wonder if this would change if those who planned the attacks hated Japanese people?... Which it is quite possible most Americans did at the time...)  

The argument goes that it was justified to kill all of these civilians because it effectively ended the war and saved many more lives than were taken by the blasts.  Using a Utilitarian ethic, this makes sense.  We kill a couple hundred thousand people to save 500,000 or a million.  The greatest good for the greatest amount of people.  Yet allow me to pose a thought experiment.  

Currently in Pakistan the Pakistani military is undertaking a major offensive against the Taliban in Southern Waziristan.  Meanwhile, the Taliban are attempting to break the political and popular support of the offensive by engaging in numerous suicide bombings targeting military officials and civilians, often detonating explosives in crowded markets.  There is a chance, as has happened before, that the military will call off the attacks under pressure and make a peace treaty with the Taliban. ("We won't bother you if you stop bombing us")  My question is, if the Taliban succeed in stopping the Pakistani fighting through the use of suicide bombers, will they be justified in killing civilians?  Many more Pakistani and Taliban lives would be saved than the number of civilians killed in suicide bombings if the fighting stopped.  The greatest good for the greatest amount of people right?   

So who are more justified? Atomic Bombers? Or Suicide Bombers?    

Ripples

A long time ago there was a man who lost a great deal of money in the stock market. He became depressed and started to drink, neglecting his own family and treating his children as worthless. The man's son grows older and marries, seeing himself as worthless and in turn treating his wife as he feels, degrading her as often as he can. One day the wife cheats on her husband because she finds someone who treats her with desire and admiration. The man in his sadness and hurt turns to alcohol to soothe his pain, just as he had seen his father do. One day as he is driving while intoxicated, he crashes into a van carrying a family, killing a mother and her two children, but leaving the father alive. This father, destroyed by the loss of what was most precious to him lashes out in rage and jealousy at those who still have children, to the point of kidnapping another's child and killing it. The parents of the kidnapped child sink into despair and numb their pain with Methanphetamines. The drug takes control of their reasoning, they become oversexualized and begin neglecting and sexually abusing their other children. One of their boys grows to be 14 and in his pain and battle against powerlessness rapes a neighbor child for offending him. The neighbor boy's mother cannot handle the guilt that she was unable to protect her son and turns to drugs herself. The boy is removed from the home, placed in foster care and ends up in a session with me.

I ask myself, who is to blame for this? Who should pay for the injustice done to my client? Is it the boy who raped him? Or the boys' parents who abused him? Or the kidnapper? How far back do we go? In an amazing session, my client's mother was talking about how she felt tremendous anger over what happened and wanted to kill the boy who raped her son, but then she softened, and said that she also felt compassion on him because she knew that in order to do this, some incredible hurt must have been done to him.

Recently, I was driving home with a strong hatred in my heart for those who have done evil to my clients and the many victims in the world. The hatred was so strong that I wanted to take justice into my own hands and kill those responsible for evil. Two recent and unexpected sources have opened my eyes to the place of hurt in the evils of this world; the book, "The Shack" and the children's book/movie "The Tale of Despereaux". Both struggle with the problem of evil from a creative and empathetic stance, realizing the complexities of the human heart. The frightening truth is that none of us are immune to deep hurt or beyond the possibility of making unloving choices as a result of this hurt.

While I believe that at each stage of the story I have described, each individual had a choice to make, I cannot help but feel more compassion and understanding for the hurt driving the decisions made. I only hope that there is a light more powerful than this strain of darkness, a redemption more glorious than the fall. I know that within my client lies the opportunity to end the darkness, and with God's help maybe someday...

My client grows to forgive the boy who hurt him and chooses to end the cycle of gaining power over others or being stepped on by others, but learns a third way of giving power to others in wisdom and trust and caring for power given. Maybe he will even become a counselor one day and help other children who have been abused. A child that he counsels learns that she is not worthless or permanently stained, goes on to marry and have children, giving her children the childhood and the love that she never experienced. Her children grow up safe and with compassion towards others. Her son travels across the world to work in a refugee camp in a war torn country. He brings healing to those who have been raped, sold into slavery, and have witnessed terrible atrocities. One boy that he rescues from slavery grows up to commit his life to freeing others from slavery and leads a movement of people to crack down on slave traders. An article is written about this man in a newspaper far away, and it is read by another man who recently lost a large sum in the stock market, causing him to put down his glass of whiskey.