In 1945, the Target Commitee at Los Alamos put together a list of recommendations for possible atom bomb targets. They were looking major Japanese cities at least three miles by three miles that had not been bombed yet, so the whole world could know just what they were capable of. At the top of the list were Kyoto and Hiroshima. When the plans were given to the Secretary of War, he gave permission to bomb any city except for Kyoto because of its statues and its museums and because, years ago, he had spent his honeymoon there.
To the people of Kyoto— you owe your grey hair and your parent's lives to a man with a magic signature who was in love. If he hadn't been such a romantic, it would've been you. If they'd chosen Paris instead, it would've been your skin roasting at 300,000 degrees. If she left him before that paper hit his desk you would be dust in half a second no one could even touch without wasting away.
To the victims of Nagasaki— you were killed for the sins of your government by the government that calls itself mine, by a president stupid fucking historians call one of the greatest because he had a good speechwriter and talked straight. You died because no white men with magic signatures who never asked yes or no, only when and where had ever biked across your town just after dark to bring home groceries, or been shown every little lake and shutdown windmill that made you never want to leave, because they weren't in love with any of you. You were murdered by the idea that an idea called a government that you can't punch or kiss has the right to kill people that you can in order to get what it's after. People with eyelids that have closed and shut a million times and eyes that have seen a million things, just a sacrifice they're willing to make, without asking you for permission. Now Pentagon men still cry when their mothers die, but what are half a million lives in the affairs of a state?
In the place called a country called the USA where I live, the man with the most magic signature of them all has an iPod, an African father and the middle name Hussein, a hard thing to pull off, but not impossible. He got where he is now by insuring that while he's living in that old white house, many more people with African mothers and fathers will be put into tiny rooms they can't leave and many more boys a quarter of his age with the first name Hussein will be killed by his handwriting. He isn't excited about this, and he wants to keep the numbers as low as he can, but it is something he will never be afraid to do.
It's the root of the power he's chosen-- every nation and every president, that systems are to be protected by all means available, and whatever happens along the way is just sad but inevitable, like highways and poverty, like armies and sin. They took a continent and purged it of its people better than Hitler could've dreamed but gave the world democracy and Saran Wrap, so it must have been worth it. But nothing is inevitable-- no freeway wrecks or poison gas, but we like eating bananas and we like the sound vroom so it all zooms on and on.
And I can't talk about the stock market like I know what I'm saying but I do know this. There is only one of you. You have things you love and things you hate and things that make you laugh. You have things to show that could turn my east into my west and things to say that could make me cry and you are priceless. You only get one life, and if anyone takes away your choice in what to do with it, it is a robbery you can never be repaid for. There is only one of you, and when you are gone you are gone forever, and no dead thing is worth you being lost before your time, no god or amusement park, no industry or tasty snack, no government, no way of life, no economic system or movement to destroy them is worth as much as me or you or anyone like us, and if these things can't last without killing us first, then let them die in our place. Because we are the only thing that can't be replaced and this whole world is ours.
Now let's start acting like it.