From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Transforming the Human Spirit

My trip to The Spring yesterday was really an eye opener. Afar, something caught my eyes right from the start. At first I couldn’t make out the images but with much scrutiny & the help of the captions provided, I finally understood what I was actually staring at. Casualties from the Hiroshima & Nagasaki atomic bombings. They were graphic & definitely heart-wrenching. My eyes glazed at the sight of charred remains of humans & the repercussions of the tragedy: diseases caused by heat rays & radiation.

One story that really tugged on my heart strings was of Sadako Sasaki & the paper cranes. She was one of the many victims of the Hiroshima bombing: she was 2 years old at the time of tragedy & lived 1 mile from ground zero. She survived but 10 years later, diagnosed with leukemia. She was hospitalized and given the most, a year to live. Spurred on by the Japanese saying that one who folded 1,000 cranes will be granted a wish, a wish she desperately wanted to come true that is for her to be cured, she started folding paper cranes whenever she could. But she fell short of her goal of folding 1,000 cranes, having folded only 644 before her death.

Do you know that there are 27 000 nuclear weapons developed & only 4 are needed to destroy this entirely world? Either do I. How ignorant I have been. That’s why I was glad to be at the Human Spirit Exhibition & read all the facts and see it with my own eyes. I signed the petition of peace and place a red dove sticker representing world peace on Anti Nuclear Weapons banner. Emotional it was but I left with a warm & fuzzy feeling. Small as it may look, I did contribute something. How about u?

:: EVERY ONE OF US CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION. AND QUITE OFTEN WE ARE LOOKING FOR THE BIG THINGS AND FORGET THAT, WHEREVER WE ARE, WE CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION. SOMETIMES I TELL MYSELF, I MAY ONLY BE PLANTING A TREE HERE, BUT JUST IMAGINE WHAT’S HAPPENING IF THERE ARE BILLIONS OF PEOPLE OUT THERE DOING SOMETHING. JUST IMAGINE THE POWER OF WHAT WE CAN DO:: Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Laureate