The Price of Forgetting: From Hiroshima to Heatwaves

August 5th is the day before Hiroshima.

What happens when history is erased, the past is politicized, and the present burns?

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The world changed on August 6, 1945—and since that day, every August 5 has become a kind of psychic limbo. A reckoning. The last breath of innocence before the mushroom cloud.

That’s how I always feel on this date.
Like we’re holding our breath in a forgotten waiting room of history—blind to what came before, numb to what unfolds now.
The silence before the sirens.
The moment before the blast.

Today—August 5, 2025—we are back in that limbo.

But this time, the sky is not split by one bomb.

The destruction is slower, more dispersed, less cinematic—yet no less final.

This time, it’s heatwaves that break records.
Rivers that dry to dust, then overflow in torrential floods.
Forests that burn unchecked, fueled by massive rains that feed new vegetation—only for it to dry, then ignite, as heatwaves and droughts return like the ticking hands of a doomsday clock.

It is rights that vanish. Books that disappear. Truth that crumbles like ash.

This time, the bomb isn’t dropped.

It’s embedded.
Woven into the system.
And we are its architects.

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I. The Myth of the Clean Bomb

The atomic bomb was sold to the American public as a necessary evil. A weapon that saved lives by ending the war. That version of reality still persists—scrubbed clean of children’s shadows burned into concrete, of survivors coughing up blackened blood, of generational trauma encoded in irradiated cells.

The lie of the clean bomb persists because it serves empire. It allows America to remain the hero of its own myth.

And that myth is still being weaponized.

Only now, it’s turned inward—against its own people.

Today’s warfare is economic, psychological, algorithmic. Yet the logic remains unchanged: justify atrocity with a false binary—us or them, freedom or chaos, purity or infection.

Today’s “them” are immigrants.

They are scapegoated for the damage inflicted by the billionaire class—that paltry 3% who not only own the means of production, but also control the distribution of goods, truth, and even hope. They’ve spent decades engineering a system where they get more—and everyone else gets less. Less pay. Less power. Less time. Less life.

And now, as the American Empire fractures under the weight of its own excess, the billionaires are panicking.

The moral calculus never changes. Only the delivery system. And the scapegoats who bear the cost of the sins committed by the ultra-rich—men who molest truth as easily as they molest children.

Protected by wealth. Worshipped by media. Shielded by spectacle.

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II. The Climate as the New War Zone

While politicians posture and billionaires build bunkers, the planet keeps the receipts.

July 2025 was the hottest month in recorded history—for the third year in a row. Massive wildfires are displacing thousands across the Pacific Northwest and Mediterranean. Crops are failing in Africa and Latin America. Major cities are approaching wet-bulb conditions too dangerous for human survival.

But it’s not just weather. It’s the slow-motion collapse of the world we were promised. A world built on endless growth, fossil-fueled prosperity, and the illusion of safety for the “civilized.” That world is burning down, and too many still think we can shop our way out of the flames.

The climate crisis isn’t just about carbon. It’s about power. Extraction.

It is a system that treats the Earth like a warehouse and people like units of productivity.

It is war by another name—waged on the body of the planet and the psyche of the people.

It is something I write about in Sapience: The Moment Is Now.

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III. Erasure as Strategy

As the temperature rises, so does the campaign to make us forget.

The Project 2025 blueprint isn’t just about rolling back regulations or gutting federal agencies. It’s about destroying institutional memory. Banning books is not just censorship—it’s conditioning and control. Erasing queer history, Black history, labor history, climate truth—it’s all part of the same project: obliterate the past so the present can be reprogrammed.

And it’s working.

What happens when a nation forgets not just Hiroshima, but Tulsa? Not just slavery, but Flint? Not just the Dust Bowl, but Paradise, California?

Such a nation becomes unmoored. Untethered. Easily manipulated. Easily distracted by pleasure, products and propaganda.

Memory is not nostalgia. Memory is resistance. When we forget, we become malleable. Controllable. Willing to call cruelty “order,” or fire “progress.”

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IV. What Is Worth Remembering

Today, on August 5, I am remembering not just the blast—but the silence before it. The illusion that everything was fine.

That’s where we are now—algorithmically embedded and entombed in illusion. Trained in the art of forgetting. Forgetting that we are space-time beings of staggering magnificence—sentient sparks capable of perceiving, feeling, and dancing with the mystery of life. One of the rarest awakenings in the known universe. And yet… here we are: sedated by spectacle, indentured to the machine, clocking in for our slow extinction under corporate rule.

(A truth explored in depth in my book, Sapience: The Moment Is Now.)

It is a myth has never relied on fact. It relies on meaning. And meaning is forged in remembrance.

So let us remember:

• That humans made the bomb—but we also made peace.
• That fire can destroy—but it can also purify.
• That forgetting is dangerous—but remembering is defiant.

Let us remember the land before it cracked. The sky before it choked. The soul before it was bought by billionaires and oligarchs.

Let us remember that we are not separate from the story. We are the storytellers.

And right now, the story is breaking.

But so are we.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s where the fire of renewal begins… like the mythical firebird.

Call to Action:

🌍 This week, remember something real.
Tell someone a story about your ancestors. Read a banned book. Visit a site of historical pain and power.
Because remembrance is not passive. It is protection.
It is protest.
It is a portal.

Tags:

#HiroshimaDay #ClimateCrisis2025 #Project2025 #HistoricalAmnesia #CollectiveMemory #SapientSurvival #WisdomGuardians #ErasedHistories #AuthoritarianCreep #AmericanMythos #ClimateJustice #PoeticResistance

🌀 Supplement: Echoes of Empire — From Galactic Collapse to American Decline

In my book Sapience: The Moment Is Now, I trace how empires have risen and fallen across human history in patterns eerily familiar to those imagined by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series. Asimov’s Galactic Empire, like Rome, like Britain, like America today, collapses not from a single blow—but from accumulated rot: arrogance, bureaucracy, inequality, and the silencing of truth.

What Asimov understood—and what history confirms—is that humans rarely respond to collapse with wisdom. We cling. We deny. We search for scapegoats. We double down on failing systems out of fear of the unknown.

Empires don’t just fall because they’re conquered.
They fall because they forget what they were for.
Because the story that once united them becomes hollow—and the people stop believing.

Sapience explores this moment as not just political, but mythological. The American Empire is in decline, and the question is not if—but how we respond. Do we fracture into chaos, or awaken into something wiser?

That, as Asimov might say, is the true test of a civilization’s soul.

🌀 Supplement: The Now Scroll

My Now Scroll minis are myth-infused micro-essays or 3-minute soul jolts that confront the collapsing empire in real time. Each one distills a powerful truth at the intersection of myth, psyche, and political reality, using poetic insight and piercing clarity to expose the deep structures of control—whether it’s cults, fascism, or the subtle ways we co-create our own enslavement.

They aren’t just commentary—they’re living scrolls that remind the reader to stay awake, to question the spectacle, and to reclaim their inner authority in a world designed to numb and domesticate human consciousness. This one is relevant to today’s blog.

🌀 Supplement: Sapient Survival Guide

Part mythic handbook, part political manifesto, part psychological field guide—this 62-page survival document is a razor-sharp reckoning with the world as it is… and a rally cry for what it could be.

The Sapient Zombie Survival Guide is not your average prepper’s pamphlet. It’s a call to those who still feel, still think, still care—those not yet devoured by the hollow hunger of authoritarianism, consumerism, or despair. It charts the psychic terrain of a country in collapse, exposing how propaganda, greed, and mythic forces have turned millions into the walking dead.

But it doesn’t stop there.

This guide arms readers with 10 survival strategies rooted in ancient wisdom, archetypal truth, and modern resistance. It invites the reader to awaken—not just politically, but mythically—and to ride the dragon of consciousness through a world set ablaze.

With poetic fire, biting satire, and unflinching honesty, this publication lays the foundation for the volumes to come—The Houses of Wreckage and The Dragon Riders’ Guide—offering not just survival, but transformation.

Check it out on Mixam.

🌀 Supplement: The Quip Collection’s Firebird Series

The Firebird is a powerful mythic symbol—radiant, untamed, and eternally rising. It evokes transformation, fierce beauty, and soulful renewal. These products capture this important symbol of soulful regeneration and transformation.