As bells tolled from churches around the Green, Al Marder bowed his head in memory of the those killed in the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
Even though our country has withdrawn from two key nuclear treaties during the Trump Administration and the Doomsday Clock has moved to a perilous two minutes to midnight„ the 97-year-old activist remains a believer in the power of people and in optimism.
Marder, along with members of the Greater New Haven Peace Council, which he chairs, were among 25 peace activists who gathered by the World War One memorial flagpole on the Green tuesday to commemorate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
The aim of the annual vigil is also to make the case that chronic basic needs in New Haven and around the world will not be met unless governments, led by the U.S., shift from war-driven budgets to ones centered on peoples’ needs.
Retired pediatric social worker Sarah Whitson, at left, has been attending the vigil for 25 years.
The gathering was timed to begin at 8:15 a.m., the precise hour and minute the world’s first atomic bomb ignited, and a never-before seen light flashed across the sky, and Hiroshima was obliterated.
Combined with the Nagasaki atomic bombing on Aug. 9, a still unknown number, between 129,000 and 226,000 people, mostly civilians, died in what remains the only use of nuclear weapons in war.
Several speakers deplored the inaction in New Haven on dealing with lead paint poisoning of children. Others bemoaned water still undrinkable in Flint, Michigan. Everyone decried a U.S. national budget that devotes 69 percent of each dollar to war purposes, so that little is left to address human needs.
“Still,” said Marder, in an interview after the vigil, “there is no alternative than being an optimist.”
The secret weapon against weapons of mass destruction, Marder said, is a cascading and growing people’s movement to shift resources from war to peace.
Jim Pandaru, one of a half-dozen readers of poems and remarks, including the annual peace declaration of the mayor of Hiroshima.
Most of the activists on hand Tuesday were grey or white-haired. No small number of canes were in evidence. Marder said they did not feel alone. More than a hundred of such gatherings as theirs were unfolding around the world, he said.
Another source of Marder’s optimism derives, he said, from his longevity. As a child, he saw the world change when enough people marched on Washington and other seats of power during the Depression demanding humane interventions that ultimately became the measures of the New Deal.
That moment has not arrived yet in American culture, Marder said, but he sees it coming. (Click here to read and listen to an interview with Marder about his lifelong career as a local Communist Party leader.)
“Today, the major issue should be peace and war. The killing in El Paso and Dayton, all this reflects the general atmosphere created in our country by a military focused budget. How do you ask for new schools when there’s all this money devoted to the armaments industry?” Marder asked rhetorically.
“There are hundreds of these little demonstrations all over the world, and that gives us hope.”
Marder, who has been attending such demonstrations since the dawn of the atomic age in the early 1950s, said he has every intention of being on the Green at the vigil once again in 2020.