Plunderers in Paradise.

It's always bound to happen like that. You are relaxing in a chair on the lawn, weary after a session of chopping down underbrush with a weed-cutter none too sharp. You reflect, gratefully, that never before have the flower and vegetable beds behind the little house looked so lush....

The long rows of zinnias, portulacas, bee-balm, petunias, and nasturtiums pattern a gay flag at the foot of the terrace, and in the back garden the vines hang heavy with tomatoes, and the bold yellow of squash already ripe speckles the shadows under the great dark leaves.

Above all, besides all, and permeating everything is that indefinable feeling of peace that you soak in through your pores as you absorb the sunlight. It is accented by the little noises that, compounded, make up the so-called silence of the country: the chirk of a colony of katydids sliced by the more strident sawing of a distant cicada, the staccato scolding of a red squirrel infuriated by a gray cousin, and the wash of the wind through the roadside maples.

The sounds blur as you doze a bit. And in that moment of utter contentment you are aware of a twinge of selfishness that you should, even for a little space, inhabit this corner of Shangri-La from which so many, so fearfully many, have been banished by the flaming sword.

And then it happens. The back door of the house bangs, and your son, who has been listening to the radio in his room, comes dashing across the lawn, hair flying, eyes wide with excitement. He blurts the news that the miracle has happened. The atom has been split, its terrific power controlled and shaped into a thunderbolt of a vengeful Jahveh.

President Truman has announced that a single atomic bomb has been dumped on a Japanese city of 340,000, probably wiping it and most of its inhabitants off the blasted acres of the Earth. The President has added with gratification that the atomic bomb means "harnessing the basic power of the universe." The very stuff of God, then, moulded into the hands of Satan but used--oh, to be sure--in a righteous, a glorious cause, and all people of peace, goodwill, and kindliness should gloat and sing paeans on the edge of that enormous crater where tens of thousands of mangled bodies fester in the stench of death.... Gloria in excelsis....

You enter the house to hear the radio, with details red and raw as dripping flesh, elaborate on the theme that humanity has been advanced by the holocaust. And when you return to the outdoors, spent and shaken, you become aware suddenly that even here in this slice of Shangri-La the feeling of peace is but a fraud and delusion.

August 1945

Ernest L. Meyer, a career newspaperman, wrote for The Progressive in the 1940s and 1950s.