A Day to Remember or Forget?

As everyone is remembering Hiroshima today, there are some things I would like to forget:

All that radioactivity released into the atmosphere for so many years.
All the needless cancer and sickness.
All the soldiers in our military who were naivly exposed to atomic blasts.
Fallout shelters, air raid sirens, Civil Defense radio tests, "duck and cover."
ICBMs, NORAD, the Strategic Air Command (SAC).
Atom Bomb, Hydrogen Bomb, Neutron Bomb, Briefcase Bomb.
Three-mile Island. Chernobyl. (I actually changed my honeymoon plans in 1986 because of this incident.)
Watching films like Radium City and Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
Nikita Khrushchev. The Cuban Missile Crisis.
Six decades of the world living under the nuclear cloud.
Etc.

Of course movies like Dr. Strangelove helped, but not enough. And then there were depressing films like On the Beach. It is not fair that our generation was the first to live in such anxiety and insecurity.

At least our parents remember the world without nuclear weapons. Baby Boomers aren't so lucky. We have never known a world free from the terror of possible nuclear holocaust. We've done a pretty good job of living our lives in spite of that threat, but it has always been there and always will be. We are children of the Nuclear Age. Where were the adults when all this was happening? They were busy creating this world for us. Thanks.

They say that children shouldn't play with fire? Sometimes I think adults shouldn't either.