ニューヨーク、ロングアイランド
NEWSDAYSの新聞記事の要旨
この新聞には、ニューヨーク・ロングアイランドのMonica Willardさんの自宅でのピースポール建立(100人が国旗をもって出席）、WPPSのことが紹介されています。このピースポールがソサエティのデボラさんからの贈り物で、世界の180カ国以上に20万本以上建てられていて、日本の詩人によりはじめられた平和運動であるとも書かれています。
モニカさんは、「自分は戦争の頃は生まれていなかったが、忘れられている大切なメッセージは、日本とアメリカは、広島とパールハーバーの一件があったけれども、仲良くやっていくことができたということです。私は東京へ自由に行くことができる」と話しています。
原文
08/07/2000 – Monday – Page A 7
A Mark for Peace On Hiroshima anniversary, a prayer gathering by Hugo Kugiya Staff Writer
Guests arrived for the peace demonstration promptly at 2 p.m., parking their sensible sedans at the heavily shaded bottom of the cul-de-sac. They were not a riotous bunch. They brought children and puppies, cheese dip and fancycookies.
They grilled hot links and chicken legs, dispensed iced tea from coolers and slurped cans of Budweiser by the pool. The scene at Monica Willard’s house in Centerport could have been any Long Island Sunday if not for one difference.
At once, all 100 of her friends and neighbors put down their plates and cups, gathered in a standing circle and hoisted flags of the world’s nations as they lauded the peace pole freshly planted in her front yard.
Ostensibly, Willard invited everyone over yesterday to mark the 55th year since the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. But, she said, the broader purpose of the demonstration was to promote the ideals of peace in every form.
“The important thing,” she said, “on an individual level or on the community level is to acknowledge the importance of everyone, not just the richest or the smartest people.” The pole looks like a fence post, a head-high,
untapered obelisk, made of western red cedar, inscribed with the prayer: “May peace prevail on Earth.” More than 200,000 such poles have been raised in 180 countries in the name of The World Peace Prayer Society, a nonprofit agency affiliated with the United Nations.
Willard received her peace pole as a gift from her friend Deborah Moldow, who is the director of The World Peace Prayer Society, started in 1955 by a Japanese poet, and now headquartered in Manhattan. Moldow said she imagines the thousands of peace poles as “acupuncture needles on the surface of the Earth, healing all the pain.” Willard is a California-born family therapist, wife and mother of three grown children. She protested the Vietnam War and has been a peace activist for more than 10 years. Her goal, which she does not think she will achieve in her lifetime, is to help abolish war.
Short of that, she said she hopes that people build peace in ordinary, everyday ways, by not assuming the worst of other drivers while on the parkways, by doing small favors for strangers, by being patient when no one around you is.
“If you look at the great leaders of the world,” Willard said, “their power comes from humility and serving. When you do something for someone else, you’re really giving something to yourself.” Most of Willard’s guests were members of her church, the Congregational Church of Huntington. Phyllis Reed, a church member from Centerport, wore her thoughts in the form of a necklace of paper, origami cranes, made by Japanese schoolchildren and given to her as a gift many years ago in Manhattan during a remembrance of Hiroshima.
Reed, 69, was a child living in Brooklyn during World War II. She remembers very clearly President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb known as Little Boy on Hiroshima on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. She and her family, like most everyone she knew, supported the decision as one that would end the war and save the lives of American soldiers. Like many others, she did not consider specifically the physical reality of the bomb. She imagined only “a giant cloud over the country.” Reed was the oldest of three girls. She had no brothers. Her father was too old to go to war. The closest relaive in the war was a second cousin. The day of Japan’s official surrender, she said, there was a party in the streets.
“Everyone poured out of their houses,” she said. “People were hanging out the car windows. It was less about getting the enemy as it was about the war being over. That is what I was celebrating. The elation was so dramatic.” The notion of supporting peace was tainted in that era, Reed said. During the war, she was waiting outside a movie theater in the Catskills when a man approached her and asked her to sign a petition.
“He said it was a peace petition,” she said. “I was a little hesitant because I had never signed a petition before and I was only 12. But I finally signed it because I thought, ‘What could possibly be wrong with peace?’ “When I told my father what I had done, he was very upset. He said those people were communists. I felt terrible, like I had done something unpatriotic.” The issue of whether the bomb was a justifiable act of war was absent from yesterday’s gathering at Willard’s home, seemingly beside the point.
“I wasn’t around during that time,” Willard said. “But the message that gets lost is that whatever happened at Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, these two countries have been able to go on. Today, I’m very free to travel in Tokyo.
There is an incredible life after horrendous events and I think if we really examined what worked there, we’d realize that peace is not so hard.”
D5 Creation