I don’t think they teach about nuclear bombs correctly in American schools. And I don’t know whose fault that is.
If you’re American, do you remember when that first came up? I mean, if you’re not American, same question. I only specify American schools because that’s my experience and I can’t nor want to generalize for the entire planet. That’s what a lot of Americans have done in the past and, uh, it hasn’t really gone that well for anyone.
I’m sure it first came up in the social studies section on World War II. After all, they first came up in reality in the days leading up to WWII. And of course, because I think at this point it was a classroom full of…what, fifth graders? Fourth? Sixth? Somewhere around there. When you’re teaching a years long conflict that had decades of lead-up and almost a centuries’ worth of consequences and changed the physical, emotional, and symbolic landscape of two-maybe-three continents to a bunch of ten year olds who haven’t discovered deodorant yet let alone know how to spell ‘geopolitics,’ you’re going to have to dumb shit down.
Germany was pissed about how they were treated at the end of the first world war. So pissed they elected a psychopath and started blaming the Jewish people for some insane reason. Hitler – the psychopath – invaded Poland and everyone got Very Mad about it. Meanwhile, for reasons I don’t believe were ever as well elucidated, Japan decided it was pissed about shit, too, and started taking their anger out on the Pacific and the rest of Asia. The US was all, “Man, this doesn’t seem like something I need to be involved in,” right up until Japan decided to bomb the shit out of Pearl Harbor for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I swear, they just sucker punched the US for the hell of it, and that made the US so angry they decided to draft every male in the country whether they had flat feet or not and launched them at full speed at both fronts. Nazi Germany eventually failed because they sucked, but Japan just wouldn’t surrender, so the US was forced to drop two new types of bombs that the world had never seen before, and thus the world was finally saved from the Axis Powers by the good old US of A.
It turns out that trying to gloss over history for the benefit of a bunch of tiny fucking morons might not be the best way to convey important topics. And there’s a lot to talk about here, how much nuance is lost, how a curriculum made by Americans, for American children is obviously going to paint the USA in the best possible light, but that’s not what I want to talk to about today.
To end the war the US developed and dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then the war was over and everybody was very happy and celebrating in the streets and that sailor kissed that nurse. The end.
I’m almost thirty years away from those bullshit days in middle school and junior high, but I’m fairly certain the Pacific Theater of WWII only came up for Pearl Harbor, and then the Bombs. And I’m also questioning whether the concept of Japan wouldn’t commit to a unconditional surrender ever even came up. There’s a big part of me that thinks that they left that part out and went straight to BOMB.
And then we were done.
That’s the part I’m trying to get at here, however roundabout my rambling. After weeks of learning about global conflict, it’s like, oh, and by the way, scientists in the middle of fuck-all New Mexico developed a hell bomb and we dropped two of them and that was that. Now it’s time to talk about…oh, no, school year is over. See you guys back next year when we start all over at the American Revolution and give you a slightly more accurate version than last year byeeeeeee.
I don’t know what the kids are learning in school these days, either, but I know when I was going thirty years ago, lessons about US history fell off a cliff after WWII. There was always a section on the Civil Rights Movement – which totally solved racism in America, don’tcha know – but how much did they teach us about the Cold War? The Korean War? Vietnam? I can’t fucking remember. What I do remember is getting to college and seeing that there were two US history courses to choose from: the 1700s to WWII and everything after WWII. And I jumped on that second class specifically because I felt like no one had ever fucking taught it to me.
Think about how insane that is. You’re telling children ‘hey, we were the first to develop weapons of mass destruction and we did it decades before you born, but it’s whatever, let’s move on.’
And as a kid, you sort of go along with it because you’re a dumb shitty kid and you don’t even want to be talking about this in the first place. And it’s not like you existed in a bubble where the only information you got was from school or your parents. I mean, I know those kids existed, and if you were one, I’m sorry, but statistically speaking you had television. You had movies. You had adults talking to other adults in your vicinity, sometimes about shit that mattered. Kids are stupid but they’re also little sponges that absorbs abso-fucking-everything around them. So even before they told us about nuclear bombs in school, we knew about them.
I wanted to say ‘especially back in the eighties/early nineties’ when I was a little kid but I guess we’ve swung back around to a generalized fear of nuclear holocaust being the norm. I don’t know, do the kids know we live under the ever-present possibility that a single person could doom the entire planet, either through rage or sheer fucking ineptitude?
If you’re a kid, comment below!
Anyway, that overhanging fear is why I wonder whose fault it is. Adults in the early nineties had lived with the idea that everything could end in an instant for most of if not all of their entire lives. It just…was. That was life. If they were old enough, they lived through a period where not only did you learn about the bomb, you did fucking drills in case the air raid sirens went off. That was what life on earth was. And the thing adults are best at is forgetting that kids literally don’t know anything. They don’t have the same experiences because they don’t have any experiences, so casually telling them that nuclear bombs could wipe us all out doesn’t feel like anything to the adult because duh, of course but feels like everything to the kid because wait…WHAT.
I feel like something as fucking monumental as nuclear bombs should have been given its own section in history class. Maybe not in middle school. But high school. College at the latest. When I was in eighth grade we took a trip to Washington, DC, where they took us to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and that place is not pulling a single punch, which it shouldn’t. The things I saw in that museum have stayed with me for decades, and hey, maybe every single American citizen should be given the money for their own trip and then we’d have less insane assholes trying to claim the Holocaust ‘wasn’t that bad’ or whatever the fuck.
But there should also be the same experience for what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of this is stemming from the fact that I spent all of 2023 slowly reading through The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, which is about six hundred pages of slow, technical, political bullshit, and then a hundred pages of some of the worst emotions you’ll ever feel in your life as he gets to the part where the US actually dropped the bombs. Rhodes puts in literal pages – maybe fifteen or twenty – of nothing but personal accounts of people who survived the bombing of Hiroshima.
And then there are the pictures.
We need to be teaching this shit to the youth, to the people who missed out, to everybody. Maybe then people would stop thinking a post-nuclear future would look like Fallout, something they could fight their way through and survive. Everybody who was rooting for fucking ‘pocket nukes’ when Russia invaded Ukraine should be forced to look at a different picture of Hiroshima every five minutes until they knock it the fuck off.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 