August 13, 2025

Letter to the Editor: Finding solace in each other

Photo: Atomic Heritage Foundation

LETTER TO THE EDITOR — By the time this letter is published, the 80th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will have passed. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9. It is fitting, though, that this letter is published on a day other than these two anniversaries: it is on ordinary days that we would do well to mourn those killed, and re-learn what is easily forgotten.

Since those two fateful days we have known, every day, that the human race has the capacity to annihilate itself. Much more recently, we have learned that we have the capacity to annihilate the earth as a green planet fit for human habitation and for the survival of other species. As we go about our daily business of loving and living, these two inescapable facts loom always in the background.

More recently, the world has witnessed a dimming of our memories of nuclear war, and a lessening of our resolution to preserve our planet as a place where we can live. We are in danger of replacing our drive to preserve life with a sense of helplessness — let the carnival rage on until the moment it falls off the edge of our irredeemable world.

I am as prone to this deadening of purpose as anyone else. But as a member of the Grey Highlands Peace Committee and the Grey Highlands Climate Action Group, I am surrounded with fellow fragile and failing spirits who, together, strive to find both purpose and path.

Facile cheerfulness will not help us address the twin existential challenges we face. Nor will helplessness hew our way forward.

Which brings me to the purpose of this letter. In the face of obscenities too large for any single one of us, may we all find solace in each other through the groups to which we belong. Groups predicated on collective action to save our world from the dumpster are strewn gloriously across our civic landscape. If you belong to one, revivify it. If you don’t, join or create a group. Focused narrow or broad, such groups are subversive carriers of change beyond the ken of individuals.

I can do little. We can move mountains.

John Butler
Member, Grey Highlands Peace Committee and Grey Highlands Climate Action Group

 

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