Through our 2021 strategic planning process, the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council identified “Advancing Social Equity and Environmental Stewardship” as a new council goal. This reflects a recognition that this goal is “integral to the success of all spiritual paths, understanding that the environment, community, and personhood are interwoven,” and protecting them should be a part of the Council’s work. With this awareness, the Council seeks to partner with area organizations to support their work and to initiate programming ourselves that further this goal.
This summer the Council was pleased to partner with PeaceWorks KC in support of their annual Hiroshima / Nagasaki Remembrance which took place on August 8. The event included a one-mile walk to the entrance to the National Security Campus (NSC) at 14510 Botts Rd., KC MO, which produces about 80 percent of the non-nuclear parts for US nuclear weapons.
In addition to supporting the event through social media and elsewhere, Council members offered prayers of peace, joining those assembled wishing that the horrors of nuclear war-making never again threaten the sanctity of life. Prayers from the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council were made by Alan Edelman, Rev. Michael Stephens, and Sirkar Ira Harritt, representing Jewish, Christian and Sufi faith traditions. Prayers from Sikh, Buddhist, and Catholic (Missionaries of the Precious Blood) faiths were sent by Council members and supporters and read, as well.
The event was poignant and moving. A highlight was the talk by Keiko Baker, the honorary principal of the Japanese School in the Kansas City area, who shared—for the first time in public—her memories from living in Japan in 1945 and the impact of the Nagasaki bomb on her and her family.
She was thirteen years old and living in Saga, Japan, about an hour and a half outside of Nagasaki on the day of the dropping of the nuclear bomb. A couple of days after the bombing, she joined her aunt and uncle who wanted to go to Nagasaki to look for their son, who was attending university there.
Ms. Baker spoke of the horrors she saw, the “beautiful valley, surrounded by mountains, once a thriving city, completely flat and smoking. What we saw, words cannot describe. People were huddled together, some were calling for loved ones, others seemed lost. It was hard to understand what we were seeing. They were charred, burnt, their bodies blackened, their skin loose and hanging, their hair was the color of ash.”
The most moving part of her talk for me was her concluding remarks, coming from a woman who personally suffered the consequences of the dropping of a nuclear bomb. “I don’t blame American citizens for this tragic event; it was the result of warring countries. The bomb was made by humans, dropped by humans, and suffered by humans, and that is no way to resolve conflict. It is an utter devastation of precious human lives. It is my wish that we never use an inhuman weapon like this ever again, anywhere on this earth.”
by Sirkar Ira Harritt