Tenacious open-mindedness

Editor's note: D.G.'s daughter May is assisting in the writing of this column.

This week marks the 80th anniversary of our country dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A few days after the bombings, on August 15,1945, Japan surrendered, effectively ending World War II. Where were you when you got news of these events? Likely, most of you were not born. But I was a five-year-old beginning my life as a news junkie. My family did not have a TV, and we got all our news through the radio.  Even at age five, I loved to listen to the radio. 

So when the news about Japan’s surrender came across the radio broadcast, my five-year-old ears and brain scrambled to understand what this meant. For me, it was simple: The Japanese had surrendered and the war was ending. This was, all in all, good news. It was cause to celebrate our resourceful and powerful country.  

What the older, seemingly wiser adults were doing was not unlike what I was doing. We were all trying to make sense of this with the limited information we had. 

In 2025, 80 years later, we are still learning what these events meant for Japanese citizens. 

When I was five, listening to the reports of the bomb on the radio, Kunihiko Iida was three years old in Japan. He was about 900 yards from the site of impact of the Hiroshima bomb. Iida did not hear the news on the radio. He woke up under a pile of glass. There was no radio for him to listen to. He heard screams and chaos around him. His mother and sister died a few days after the bomb was dropped. There was no good news, no celebration. 

Isn’t all news this way? It appears one way to us at the moment. We are all, like five-year-old me, only capable of digesting the news given to us, with the flawed information, ears, eyes, and brains we have to interpret it. The full story just cannot be presented at the moment. Perspective and years reveal that there are many sides to the story. 

But even five-year-olds know right from wrong. While their moral reasoning is not fully formed, they do empathize and understand concepts like fairness.  Did my five-year-old self wonder what was happening to children or grown ups in Japan? Probably not. But my eighty-five-year old self thinks a lot about what is happening to people in war-torn countries today. 

What about the current events that define us today? In 80 years, what will we know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that might change the way we think about it?  Will we have a different, more nuanced understanding about the complexities in Ukraine and Russia? Will we understand different facets of climate change? 

When it comes down to it, we are all essentially five-year-olds, doing our very best to make sense of what we are hearing. Part of being a human of any age is that we always have a limited view. Our own experience can never give us all the information. We rarely know the full meaning of the moment while we’re still in it.  

So we need to lean into both curiosity and humility. We need to ask questions, talk about the hard things, push for answers, and stay curious about what is happening to our counterparts in other parts of the world who are experiencing a very different reality from our own. 

Maybe this type of tenacious open-mindedness is the most grown-up thing we can do at any age.