There's a god for that
for five decades, loving and being loved by his family.
I first visited my father-in-law’s hometown in 1982. At that time everything was new, the city was neat and orderly, nothing was jumbled or unplanned, everything was exactly 37 years old: streets, bridges, sidewalks, railways, buildings, marketplaces, all rebuilt from the ground up.
When the city reorganized itself in 1946, the new leaders of the city made an important decision: they would rebuild their destroyed city, but they would set aside one part of it, at its very center, to become the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
Today, at one end of the park, is the symbolic genbaku domu – the skeletal remains of a commercial exhibition hall – damaged, but not destroyed, by the bomb. At the other end of the park is the Peace Memorial Museum, which is curated to provide visitors with factual information about the effects of nuclear radiation. Between these two is a wide stretch of open ground, containing various memorials dedicated to the tragedy, and between these memorials the open space is covered over with hard surfaces, nearly all of it devoid of vegetation. Here, on hot August days, the sun strikes the hard surfaces, reflecting so brightly that it hurts your eyes; and the heat of the sun is magnified by the heat rising from the hard surface, making the place feel oppressive; and the open space is so devoid of vegetation that you want to leave. And just when you start to say to yourself, this park is so ugly, how could they create such a terrible place, how could anyone create a memorial that makes you feel so bad, and what am I doing here I just want to go someplace with trees . . . then you realize: there was no refuge on that day, there was only heat and thirst and worse, much, much worse.
This is not a place where you go to feel good.
Every one of our world leaders should visit this place.
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