By Amy L. Dalton

Aug. 9 is my birthday. I remember clearly the moment I learned that it was also the anniversary of the detonation of the second of the only two nuclear bombs ever detonated as an act of war.

I was in high school history class, and we were discussing the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6 — and Nagasaki three days later. Time slowed down as I did the math. The wave of horror that moved through me that day was only a codification of a more blunted horror that had been gradually congealing in my heart since early adolescence, when the depth of the wrongness in our world first began to invade my consciousness.

Before anyone told me about “anti-racism” or “white privilege,” I knew at some pre-lingual level: My life is tied up in a larger death dance. My life is tied up in the suffering and death of countless real people — the hallow-eyed ones on the covers of Time magazine; the weather-worn ones who I regarded through the safe frame of my parents’ car window; the marginal ones who scuttled in and out before one could blink an eye, leaving gleaming windows and carefully tended gardens, and then one day not returning. Those ones whose names have been forgotten, smiles stolen, identities obliterated.

The moment of realization recurs over and over as I grow and learn, in spite of myself, of the shape and depth of the pain. My life and these deaths — and the wrongness woven into both — they are fused, interwoven like a tight double helix.

Yet it is a mystery how this spiraling helix grows into the world as I know it. How does this potential-filled interdependence become a monstrous mushroom cloud of empire and exploitation? There are a host of fusions and connections that I cannot see — they are shrouded.

This year I have learned something else about Aug. 9. In visiting the Stop Bechtel campaign web-site (www.au-gust6.org), I now know that Aug. 9 is also the “International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.” It was declared as such by the United Nations in 1994 as part of a decade-long effort to focus attention on the specific issues of indigenous peoples.

What difference do such gestures make? I am not sure, but this year in the days surrounding Aug. 9 activists in dozens of cities around the country, including Portland, will participate in what might be the congealing of a new consciousness — one that has an answer to the horror.

The call is to “Stop Bechtel: from Hiroshima to Yucca Mountain to the Middle East.”

According to the coalition’s web-site, Bechtel Corporation — the world’s number one nuclear profiteer — “connects the dots” between the anti-war, anti-nuclear,environmental and indigenous rights movements. Not only did Bechtel have a hand in developing the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more than a hand in the mess that is behind U.S. interests in the Middle East, but it receives billions of taxpayer dollars to both perpetuate the nuclear agenda through the development of test sites and production plants, and “manage” the radioactive waste its plants are generating. Both stages of this dubious enterprise are implemented at the expense and on the backs of the environment and indigenous populations — most notably a proposed disposal facility on Yucca Mountain in Nevada, on land designated to the Western Shoshone Nation by treaty.

The campaign — which is a coalition organizing effort involving United for Peace and Justice and the War Resisters League, among others — is combining a decentralized protests with a focus on four locations where the connections are particularly resonant. Actions will be held at nuclear research and production facilities which Bechtel manages: the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (where the enriched uranium for the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was created), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. On Aug. 9, activists will bring the week to a close with an action at Bechtel Corporate Headquarters in San Francisco.

In these locations and over a dozen others, educational and remembrance events are also being planned. The Portland commemoration will take place at 6 p.m. on Aug. 6 at the Japanese American Historical Plaza at NW Couch and Naito. It is being coordinated by the Oregon chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and will include expressions of remembrance by the Toki Taiko drum troupe, the Aurora Chorus, dancer/choreographer Chisao Hata, and Asian Reporter columnist Polo Ronault Catalani.

According to PSR’s call, “Sixty-one years ago a nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan — and from that day on, the world has lived under a nuclear shadow.”

Yet with some careful examination, we can start to see the precise shape and origin of this mushroom cloud shadow. When we shine the light on Bechtel’s work in this way, what might otherwise feel like a pervasive and omnipresent sense of wrongness becomes a visible set of power relations and decisions.

What has been a powerful tradition of remembrance is being called forward in this campaign into the realm of re-ordering. The task at hand is not just to keep a certain story alive, but to explain and engage with its details — with the ultimate aim of telling a different story.

Bechtel’s Yucca Mountain disposal facility is located on land considered sacred by the Shoshone Nation. The mountain in Shoshone language is called “Serpent Swimming West” and each spring and fall people gather there in worship. On Aug. 9, I want to learn this story.

Amy L. Dalton is an organizer and writer living in Portland, OR, and attending seminary at the Northwest House of Theological Studies. She has volunteered with the Indymedia network since 2000 and is currently on the editorial team of the U.S. site.