Journal 7 - Lexi Patterson

Part One: Obviously my biggest takeaway would be the amount of destruction the atomic bomb caused to the town and to the people of Hiroshima. Before this book, I had never heard how many people actually died, or about the struggles the survivors went through to survive. It's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that 80,000 people died in an instant, just like that. The other takeaway I got from the book was how long the survivors were sick, and what they had to go through in order to be healthy again. I knew radiation had been a problem after the bombing, but I had no idea how sick it would make people and what symptoms and problems it would cause them. "Some victims recovered in a week; with others the disease [radiation sickness] dragged on for months and months" (77).  Even some people who were not really affected by the radiation, still suffered from other injuries for a very long time. Just like Miss Sasaki who was crippled by a leg injury and in the hospital for 14 months, to fix the leg that was injured in the bombing. All of the characters in this book went through remarkable circumstances to overcome the odds of surviving, and that is extraordinary.
Part Two: The fire bombings on the 60+ cities was the most surprising to me. I had never heard of such a thing until this podcast. And I'm curious to know why the fire raids are not as popularly known as the bombing. Especially since Dan Carlin stated that more people were killed from these fire raids than from the two atomic bombs. I am curious to know more about these fire raids and how the people of Japan reacted to such horrible occurrences. I was also surprised at the way Carlin presented this podcast. He took the view of Americans, and presented their side of the war and the bombings. I had never heard someone argue this side so I was interested in hearing this. I enjoyed Carlins quote, "When is it promiscuable to kill 100,000 civilians in a Japanese city? When you are going to save 10x or 15x or 20x that number of people."
Part Three: I think that we should all just try to be peaceful. Even if it's just on a personal level to your friends and family. Have peace with people and then hope that it will spread onto a bigger basis so that our whole country can have peace. We should all just agree to have peace and not war. The world is only so big and we should not be trying to destroy it by having war, and bombing other countries and ruining the one home we have. Spread peace and the world will be a better place.