Jump the track to endless war: consider pacifism

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I am quoting from my most recent book "Your Soul Knows a call to visionaries, poets and people pf heart" "According to Einstein the nuclear age should have changed the way we think, gotten us off the rational track onto an intuitive footing with our imaginative, feeling, conscientious nature. He thought we were ripe for this shift and now I believe that many of us finally are."

Is this accurate?

The mayor of Nagasaki, Shiro Suzuki, would probably disagree.

August 9 was the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki where a plutonium bomb was dropped by the USA, instantly wiping out almost 80,000 people. As part of the solemn ritual of remembrance of that day (that changed the way many Japanese think! [thats 1000 people dead for every year that separates us from that horror. . .]), He made this appeal at the ceremony: "Conflicts around the world are intensifying in a vicious cycle of confrontation and fragmentation, . . .If we continue on this trajectory, we will end up thrusting ourselves into a nuclear war."

This started me wondering: what does it take to change how people think? Of course, there is no one answer. But I can tell you what got me to think differently: It was two things: 1) At a very early age I was aware that my parents were afraid the world would end. (We went shopping for a bomb shelter when I was about 5 years old in 1956.) As I grew older and realized that the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still being created, and stockpiled and were being aimed at us, and 2) It began to dawn on me that our leaders were insane and could not be trusted. Then there was Vietnam (which I could watch on the nightly news), and the draft.

Up until about the age of 17, I was processing all of this, protected by my age and that I was still in high school. After that, suddenly, overnight!, I was on my own, like a live cow being delivered to a slaughter house.

Yesterday a friend, curious as to how I handled the draft as a pacifist, transfixed me with the prompt: "You must have been terrified!" I blurted, "No, I was empowered!" Thats the truth, my truth. I was empowered to find my own way, following my heart and conscience.

So, it occurs to me that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by its (karmic) complement, Vietnam, affected me exactly as Einstein hoped it would affect us all it changed the way I thought!

Why was Vietnam the last drop of water in my full glass of awakening? Because it was personal!

It knocked me off the track I was on and I found my intuitive footing (with the help of) my imaginative, feeling and conscientious nature, in the Navaho desert, where I retreated after filing for my 1A conscientious objector exemption.

This is the time -- right now, before someone pushes the button, for all of us to jump the track that is leading us to chaos and destruction. We should listen to the mayor of Nagasaki. We should let it in.

We should make it personal.