. . . I’m going to explode. In a huge mushroom cloud. The media freakin’ loves this phrase, the drama of it, the imagery. “The Senate is going nuclear” or, in other words, making an adjustment to their rules of procedure. It allows for a vote to carry on a simple majority, rather than a super majority. Such things do not, normally, turn buildings to dust.
The override option has been used before, in 1975 to make other rule changes, in 2013 for judicial appointments and just a few moments ago to add other nominations to the list. None of this is what we’d call a bombshell.
My problem is not with the rule change. It’s the language. First, nothing goes nuclear. One might go to Nuclear, where it a city in Nevada. One might become nuclear, I guess. If one were a protein that decides to become the center of a cell. Otherwise, it’s a stupid construction.
But even that doesn’t bother me as much as the belittling of the adjective. For those who were sitting at school one day when it looked like the sun set down in their hometown and they heard a boom louder than their ears could stand, watched their world burn and their friends and family die where they stood, the word has a different meaning.
I’d like every news reader to read Tomiko Morimoto's
brief account of the day bomb fell on Hiroshima, and then decide if they may what to call a rule change what it is. She allowed for an interview this back in 2009 --
In 1945, Tomiko Morimoto was a 13-year-old schoolgirl. She recalls feeling no particular fear when she and her classmates heard the lone American B-29 bomber droning through the cloudless skies above Hiroshima. Her city had never been bombed, and she assumed the plane was simply on a reconnaissance mission, like the others she had seen.
Then she saw the flash. "You know how you see the bright sun that's going down on a very hot day? Bright red -- orange red. That's what it was like," she recalls. "After we heard a big noise like a 'BOONG!' 'BOONG!' Like that. That was the sound."
After the sound, she recalls, "everything started falling down; all the buildings started flying around all over the place. Then something wet started coming down, like rain. I guess that's what they call black rain. In my child's mind, I thought it was oil. I thought the Americans were going to burn us to death. And we kept running. And fire was coming out right behind us, you know."
Adults at the school led Tomiko and her classmates across the Motoyasu River to a plateau on the outskirts of Hiroshima, and told them to wait for family members to come get them. All night long, they watched their city burning below. The next morning, no parents had come, and the children were released to find their way home on their own. For Ms. Morimoto, that meant trying to find a bridge into the city that had not been destroyed.
She remembers seeing "dead people all over. All over! Particularly, I can remember… I saw a Japanese soldier that was still mounted right on his horse -- just dead! Also that a streetcar had stopped just at that moment [of the bomb] and the people still standing, dead."
Finally, Ms. Morimoto says she found a bridge she and her classmates could cross safely - a railroad bridge. She recalls looking down through the spaces between the railroad ties. Normally, one would see the river flowing there underneath. But she says, instead she saw "a sea of dead people. There was not one space for the water, just people lying there and dead."
Survivors she encountered begged for water. "Mainly, I just wanted to find my people. Finally -- finally! -- I reached home and of course my home was gone and I couldn't find anybody."
The only person who recognized Ms. Morimoto was a family hired man, who told her her grandparents had taken refuge with some neighbors in a certain nearby cave.
"And I found my grandmother and grandfather among them. Of course my grandfather was terribly hurt," she says. "He had glass lodged all over his back, bleeding. My grandmother, she wasn't hurt but she couldn't stand up from shock. My mother, I didn't find her for a week or so, and she was burned underneath a building. I hoped she died instantly."
