If I could Change Hisory

When I thought about the topics for Mama Kat this week, none of them really stood out for me accept Prompt number 2. If you could witness (or take part in) any event in history, what would it be? Why? (inspired by Texan Mama from Who Put Me In Charge Of These Kids).

As you can tell, I am South African and man have we dealt with a lot of things in the past. Apartheid being the most prevalent thing in our past and the horrors that came with the hatred of colour, one would easily assume that it would be easy to write about. Unfortunately I don't have much personal experience with this time myself and only identify with being called names for being coloured when my parents put me in a school in a predominantly Afrikaans white suburb. It did not hurt as much to me because I did not understand the struggle, I was not there. When I hear the stories of Steven Biko, it is so strange that all that happened to him happened in this country and at the hands of people who are the very same colour of my close friends.

This time is no more to us and I went to schools where the colour lines were blurred and strive to teach my kids the equality between people. So this is not what I will write about.

When I went to Public school in grade 8, it was very foreign to me. If you have read my previous post on my Childhood label, you will know that I never attended Mainstream or even public school until my first high school year. I felt strange and awkward because there forty students in a class and I did not relate to the environment and the teachers at all. Then I met Mr C. He was assigned to be our English teacher that year. I thought he was a strange man, he had a reddish tone to his skin and an accent I had never heard before. It turned out that he was from Israel and was a pretty good teacher. He taught me something that will live with me for the rest of my life. It was not English, but something in history my mind never knew existed and the more he told the more I was drawn into the events of that time.

Hiroshima is a City in Japan that was millions of Kilometres away from where I was raised but it is a place I long to see one day. Mr C told us about the Atomic bombs that devastated the city on August 6, 1945 during World War II. The horrors that he described, people's flesh being burnt from their bones and dying in agony, really hit my core. I used to sit and think about how much these people suffered when the bomb hit the ground. The innocent children that lost their lives that day are what bother me most. Did they have to die so brutally, did they have to die at all.

The way I would if I could change the horrific day from even coming to pass would be simple. It is said that Japan was a few days from surrendering to the US and if only those few days were allowed, hundreds and even thousands of people would have been saved. I still sit and wonder how people find it in themselves to murder others, much less thousands of people. In my mind, people were born with good in their hearts, were they not, so what happened between birth and murdering someone. When Harry S Truman made the decision to drop the bombs, what his thought pattern at the time? He could not possibly have deemed all those innocent lives as a threat, could he? Was that the legacy he wanted to leave behind. I certainly wish I could have been his wife that day, to talk him into thinking more clearly because I think one life should be saved at all cost, and humanity is more important than possession.

This Post was inspired by Mama Kat's Writers Workshop