"Trinity’s Shadow"
by Edward Curtin
Excerpt: "I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.
Someday I will die and I wonder why. This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.
Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days. Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death. They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy. They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were. They thought they were gods. Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.
Where are they now? Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Where are the just and the unjust? Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living? Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”
Joseph Biden, the second Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world toward a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by the CIA for pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.
The wheel turns. We count the years. We wonder why.
Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.” It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons. The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope. Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me. I suppose it has haunted me. It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.
Was I born in a normal time? Is war time our normal time? It is. I was."
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