What monstrosity is this?

Hiroshima. Nagasaki. We're learning about these places and their disastrous histories in (surprisingly) Writing class, as the unit we're studying is peace and how to achieve it and it was used as an example of using violence to achieve peace, since the bombings ended World War Two.

But are we going to learn about the Bataan Death March? How many people even know what that is?

I've known about Hiroshima and Nagasaki for years. I'm not sure if I heard about it through my parents or on the History channel, but I do remember, while watching a "Fairly Odd Parents" movie, the part where the character Timmy splits an atom and it explodes, and thinking to myself, "Like in Japan!"

But never did I know about the Bataan Death March until today. The Japanese marched US soldiers for miles and miles and miles. They were tortured. Starved. When a man would die the others would have to dig a grave for him (with their hands?). When a sick man would drop of exhaustion, they would dig him a grave as well and bury him alive.

Apparently my brother-in-law's grandfather, whom he calls Papa, and who is around ninety eight years old, is the last survivor of this tragedy. He wrote a book about it, but it was never published. My brother-in-law told me he couldn't even finish reading it because it was so horrific.

What kind of civilization are we, what kind of people, where these kinds of things can happen and we can just move on with our lives? After all of the multitudes of wars that have taken place on the face of our earth, all the genocide, how can we just go about our days with our computers and TVs and gaming systems?

It's because we can't handle this sort of thing. I usually am, I'm usually able to just move on and shrug it off and think, "That's horrible, but I shouldn't linger on the past." But this, this... is inexcusable. Historians and others are still, to this day, trying to find reasons that will justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with reasons like "Oh, well, the Japanese were being bad too so they needed to be punished" and "They would have been firebombed anyways, so it really doesn't matter." No. There is absolutely no justification for this, or the Bataan Death March.

It's ****ed up, and what's worse is that people can just live with themselves after learning what their own countries have done.