Response to Genghis Khan

Dear Genghis Khan, 

I understand your loneliness, as I too awoke to be in a different era. You are not alone. Nevertheless, you should be quite thankful to at least be on earth as I am currently stuck in orbit around our planet. Yet, we come from completely different time zones, and your views on the Iranian conflict shows this. Upon reading your blog post I immediately used the Google search engine to catch up on these events. It’s wonderful to have so much information available at the touch of my finger tips. This also gave me the opportunity to catch up on your legacy Mr. Khan. You see, I was a mathematician and a physicist, in school I rarely had the time to squeeze in classes concerning the humanities. History was always a bore to me, but reading about your life sent shivers down my spine. I believe your perspective on the Iranian/United States debacle is not only antiquated, yet from the point of view of a malicious conqueror. As the years have passed, much has changed. Even though I only time traveled 60 years, everything on our planet has altered drastically, and you-Mr. Khan-have lost thousands of years of historical events. You severely misunderstand the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings in World War 2, and the consequences that occurred years after. I was alive throughout the second World War, and although I was a child, the images on my family’s television set never left my mind. The United States bombed Japan causing thousands of deaths, as if the lives lost from the Nazi’s weren’t enough. The radiation from the Nuclear Attack caused children from miles away to be born with disabilities and adults to develop cancers. It’s ruined their land prohibiting the growth of crops. What was once a bustling, fertile city became a barren wasteland. If you lived through these events as I did, you might have seen the atrocities, although I worry my perspective won’t get through to the mind of someone like you. From my journey orbiting earth I’ve seen fires uproar in Australia. The deserts have expanded from the first satellite images. Forests have shrunk. Antarctica’s ice caps are mere fractions of what they used to be. Our earth is already in the midst of it’s decay. A nuclear attack will not only kill thousands of innocent individuals, but it will advance to the collapse of the land you are standing on and the air you breath. If there’s anything you care about Mr. Khan, it is yourself. I truly believe in my heart of hearts that if another airstrike that’s comparable to what happened in Japan occurs, your life is also at stake. I suggest that you use the same Google search engine to understand what the world has gone through in your absence. Perhaps, this will educate you and thus influence your understanding of current events.  

-B. Swain