Right arrow/space/click right side of the screen to go forward; left arrow/click left side of the screen to go backward. ~ Forum version: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/9070430/ Author's note: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/9072296/ ~ Trigger warning for mentions of shootings ~ I've thought about this a lot lately. The news is sensationalist and dramatizes tragedy, and we eat it up every day, and yes, it's important to learn at our world, but at least for me, it comes at the expense of hope. Is it worthwhile to learn about our world if it makes us think we can do nothing to change it? I don't know. But this collection is my attempt to reckon with that question. ~ Footnotes (recommended reading if you don't know the history of the U.S.'s nuclear testing) July 1st, 1946: The date of the first nuclear test in the Marshall Islands, Crossroads Able. Gilda: A nod to the nickname of the Able bomb, after a movie character in a 1946 film of the same name. The Marshall Islands: A collection of islands in Micronesia and the location of the United States’s largest and most publicized nuclear detonations between 1946–1958. “It was as if the sun came out. Tremendous.”: Barbara Kent’s (Trinity test witness) description of the Trinity test. “Even the blind…with kids’ lives.”: The Trinity test was detonated near a dance camp in the summer of 1945. 100 miles away from the detonation site, a blind girl saw the bright flash. Campers thought the radioactive fallout from the bomb was snow, made hot by the summertime, and played in it. Trinity: The first nuclear test, launched in New Mexico on July 16th, 1945. It was made highly secret. “You called it the will of God; of course it was good.”: Navy Commodore Ben Wyatt, when telling the people of Bikini Island in the Marshall Islands to relocate so the U.S. could do their nuclear testing, called it “for the good of mankind.” Another video shows the Marshallese leader, Juda, saying (via English translation) they would go, “believing everything good, and everything in God’s hands.” Wyatt responded, “Everything being in God’s hands, it must be good!” “…bombed that place to hell”: A reference to Bob Hope’s quote, “As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn’t been touched by the war and blew it to hell.” “…it is safe for you to go home now…”: The U.S. government publicly promised the Marshallese that their radiation-contaminated home was safe to go back to in the 1960s before conducting studies on the Marshallese to observe radiation’s effects on humans (Project 4.1) with neither their knowledge nor consent. ~ Word count: 1,640 words without the footnotes, 1,956 with ~ Credits: A huge thank-you to… • Zy () for critiquing this collection very last minute! • My eighth grade history teacher for pushing me during our research project then. In case you couldn't tell, mine was about the Marshall Islands • My chemistry teacher and class for the inspiration for the last poem, which is my recollection of the responses. Sorry if I got yours slightly wrong- • You for reading!
