Throughout our visit to Japan, I was impressed by the welcoming attitude of the people. Japan has become a nation dedicated to friendship and peace. The event on the morning of August 6, 1945 served to reverse their course in history. One plaque in the museum commemorated the Japanese Empire’s former war-mongering stance and noted that now, since the bomb, they are no longer that way. War is not the answer. They have changed. One event, one terrible violent, destructive, bloody event, shook them up so that they changed.

Maybe though, it wasn’t the people themselves that changed. Maybe it was just their leaders. The rotating wall showing faces of victims lost in the bomb were overwhelmingly women and children. The leaders who made the decision to go to war were not those who made the ultimate sacrifice. It was the innocents who suffered and paid with their lives.

My life as a woman has been marked by “taking care” of people and things. From the children in my own home, to pets they left behind when they moved out, to aging parents, to grandchildren. I would be hard-pressed to fill my days without someone to feed and take care of. Other women have different amounts of the nurturing instincts I feel. Indeed there is an complete spectrum of nurturing care among us. Women in general are more loving, giving, caring, and compassionate than men. Where would we be now if women, instead of men, had historically led the way in many countries around the world?

What will it take to shake our leaders awake enough to lead for the people’s benefit, and not for their own narrow interests? Will the Orwellian dictates emanating from Washington be enough? Or will it take something that will be far more violent, destructive and terrible?

Will we, as a country, return to our role as leader of humanitarian advances in the world? Or will we succumb to ever-increasing limits on our own personal freedoms and education?

What will it take?

Whatever might be the turning point in our tide of division and anger, I hope the world will remember that Americans and the US government are not the same thing. There are plenty of decent, compassionate Americans still here. The leader who was not elected by the people speaks NOT for us.

I imagine many of the Japanese civilians who suffered from the bomb were decent, compassionate people. The innocents were not to blame. Their emperor spoke not for them, nor for the anguish in their hearts.

I recall the visiting Russian delegation that made a stop at my home last summer to view our alternative energy installations became my friends. They were good, people, decent and compassionate. Perhaps their government speaks not for them either.

And the Arabian family we invited to Thanksgiving dinner a couple years ago. A Muslim father, his beautiful and gracious wife, and two sweet children joined us to experience the traditional American feast. They were decent, compassionate people. I could see it in their smiles and feel it in the openness of their conversation.

Each of us, in every moment, can conduct ourselves as kind ambassadors to those we meet. If our government lacks consideration for the rest of the world, we must fill in the gap. We are our own ambassdors, in every way possible. It matters how we treat our neighbors on planet Earth.

If we learn anything from the Hiroshima story, let it be that people are people— kind, loving, compassionate neighbors on this planet. A nation, regardless of the continent it occupies, is not the land, nor its leaders. A nation is its people. No people, no country on earth, deserves the kind of destruction an A-bomb represents.

We can’t afford to forget that.