quote: In the picture, the girl will always be 9 years old and wailing "Too hot! Too hot!" as she runs down the road away from her burning Vietnamese village.
She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.
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I remember this so well. Some images come to capture & symbolize an entire event or situation so completely, & this is one of them. It ranks with historic pictures like the listless, emaciated Ethiopian child too weak to shoo the flies off his/her face, or the survivors of the Armenia earthquake frantically digging for missing people, or the flag raising on Iwo Jima.
And what a life story after all that, trying to live a normal life & maybe help people learn from one innocent child's ordeal.
Sadly, 40 years later, human beings still haven't learned how to live in peace so all children can grow up safe & healthy.
Posts: 12811 | Registered: Apr 2005
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If I remember correctly, she and the American who dropped that bomb were able to meet. One of the more tender and touching articles I ever read.
quote:Sadly, 40 years later, human beings still haven't learned how to live in peace so all children can grow up safe & healthy.
We've been killing each other for at least 100 times that long, right? But for one or two tiny exceptions, we don't have 'living in peace' in us for more than a generation or two. We take comfort in the promise that peace will eventually be imposed upon us from above. To pine for it earlier, seems like a waste of energy to me.
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I was planning on having my kids watch Saving Private Ryan at some point as an object lesson in the way the world is because people reject the Gospel, but in another thread it seemed to be suggested that Grave of the Fireflies might be better.
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The biggest difference between now and then (long ago then) is communication. I think communication is helping. There is a significant reduction in invasions. Now a days, the majority of atrocities are people hurting fellow citizens of their country.
Posts: 10845 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:I remember this so well. Some images come to capture & symbolize an entire event or situation so completely, & this is one of them. It ranks with historic pictures like the listless, emaciated Ethiopian child too weak to shoo the flies off his/her face, or the survivors of the Armenia earthquake frantically digging for missing people, or the flag raising on Iwo Jima.
I remember around 9/11, National Geographics located the famous "Afghan Girl". It made me so sad to read about her life since the famous photo and how her hard life was written on her face.
quote: If I remember correctly, she and the American who dropped that bomb were able to meet.
My understanding is that the napalm was actually dropped by South Vietnamese pilots. However, there were American advisers in the area, and perhaps one of these felt responsible and is who she met. A nit, I know.
quote: I think communication is helping. There is a significant reduction in invasions. Now a days, the majority of atrocities are people hurting fellow citizens of their country.
Sadly, there is little sociological evidence that increased contact between different cultures promotes peace. I was shocked a few years back to read of a RAND study that concluded that, the more neighboring but disparate cultures learned about each other, the more they came to hate each other's guts. Very depressing.
On the other hand, if you can reduce the cultural differences, you have some real hope of reducing conflict. Good luck getting the ruling elite to ever publicly admit that building McDonald's everywhere is helping promote world peace.
I believe the reduction in invasions, and the increase in low-level conflicts such as civil wars, reflects the reality of a world dominated by superpowers armed with nuclear weapons who are rightly afraid to fight each other and have learned by sad experience that it is safest to quickly shut down international conflicts while staying out of internal conflicts. The exceptions that will doubtless come to mind prove the rule.
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