Remember This

Remember this on November 8, 2016: August 6, 1945.

"But there came another event, one beyond prediction, which sprang out of minds that lived apart from my world of social context, a development of the secret laboratory and not the public market place or parliament--an unsocial event which yet bore upon society with a depthless profundity, unmatched in immediacy and portent any social idea with which I had been familiar.  I did not hear of the revolutionizing fact until a couple of days after the news had stupefied the literate world.  I had wandered into the village [on the California coast] and was reaching over the drugstore counter when my eyes fell on the headline that announced the transaction of Hiroshima.  It was like a heavy blow on the chest, and the concussion left me in a kind of mental coma for days.  It seemed then for a time that everything was not only uncertain but pointless.  It seemed to me that everything I had learned was junk for the trash barrel, that everything I had seen was senseless illusion, that all I had come to believe was hollow mockery, and that all my life to this point had been lived for nothing.

...Life must go on.  Now the issue was squarely put to me and my generation, whose real trial and test was now revealed to be not at all accomplished, as I had imagined, but to lie just ahead.  How was life to go on?"

Eric Sevareid
Not So Wild A Dream (see previous post below)