What Does War Have to Do with Lauren Sánchez?
And Can Men Ever Learn Peace?
Hi there,
A few notes before we start:
🎙️ WEALTHY The Matriark Podcast launched last week with our first guest Hall Rockefeller, Founder of Less Than Half, and this week’s episode is LIVE with my chat with Susan Sandler, Fonder of PopUp Season. The free 30 minutes episode is available on Apple, Spotify, and Youtube, and the Full episodes (both Audio and Video) are available for our Paid Subscribers in our Podcast page.
ALSO: Please save the date for a very special Salon on August 20th in EAST HAMPTON!
OK, onto our regular programming.
I’ve been seeing incredible things in Japan: beautiful design, thoughtful details, food that’s out of this world. I dropped my first notes about my Japan trip in our special diary here on Substack, and I’ll add more soon (yes, there will be shopping recs).
But today, I need to share something else.
A few days ago, I was at the Osaka Expo, walking through incredible national pavilions where countries proudly showcase their culture, their technologies, their hopes for the future. A celebration of what humanity can build.
And then I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
In 1945, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed an estimated 140,000 people by the end of that year. Nearly half of them died on the first day. Over 6,000 of them were schoolchildren.
The museum doesn’t shy away from the truth. But the horrors are so vast, so intimate, so devastating, that nothing I write here will ever fully capture them.
All these families were just living their lives. Going to school. Making lunch. Walking to work. And then, in an instant, everything changed.
This history is not abstract for me. Though my grandmother wasn’t born in Hiroshima, she spent most of her life there before immigrating to Brazil with her family. That decision—made long before I was born—is the reason I’m here to tell this story. And the reason I feel such urgency in telling it.
My mother, paying her respects at The Flame of Peace
After visiting the museum, I kept asking myself why there isn’t anything similar back in the US. (it’s obviously a rhetorical question, we know why). Every country has its ghosts, and if we truly care about understanding the harm we’ve inflicted on others, these museums shouldn’t exist only where people died. They should exist wherever power has failed humanity.
If more Americans saw what the Japanese see in Hiroshima —if they walked through those halls, faced those photographs, felt the weight of that history—we might better understand the real cost of our government’s choices, and think twice before supporting military action. It’s no small detail that Barack Obama was the first and only sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima.
Conversely, Japan should have a Pearl Harbor Peace Memorial, one with the same intention, and maybe more Japanese citizens would truly grasp the toll of their government’s wartime aggression, and total lack of vision for the future and safety of the people of Japan.
I took this photo at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Innocent children who survived the bombing but whose parents did not.
Peace isn’t built on pride. It’s built on truth.
And here’s the thing: from everything I’ve read, seen, and felt on this trip, it’s clear that ever since the atomic bomb, Japan has cultivated a much broader and more intentional culture of peace than the United States has. Which leads to an unsettling question:
Do we have to come close to annihilation in order to truly value peace?
I don’t think that’s the human condition.
I think that’s the male condition.
But instead, we stay distracted. We gossip about Lauren Sánchez’s outfit changes at her wedding. We mock her face, her dress, her presence, while saying nothing about the man next to her.
This is the pattern. A woman stands next to power, and we tear her down. A man wields power, and we let it slide.
It’s easier to shame the woman than to interrogate the man, who is most likely the one with more power and stronger impact in the world we live today.
And this, too, is part of the war machine.
Power-hungry men have made decisions that led to death, destruction, and displacement for millions. Over and over. Century after century. And we keep letting them.
It’s time to pass the baton to women. Men have not been able to prove they can keep us safe, and it’s time we give the job to those with better qualifications.
Read these statistics posted by Vital Voices, who also posted this question: “How many women-led countries are waging war right now? Go ahead, take a guess”. Exactly.
Peace is not passive. It is not naïve. Peace is brave and bold.
And it requires us to reimagine power: not as dominance, but as responsibility.
PS: I’m not a Lauren Sanchez apologist, but I’ll be damned if I have to criticize a women before I look at every men’s wrongdoings, which I can guarantee are a many times worse than any fashion sin Lauren Sanchez has ever committed. No matter how much people hate her or what she represents, she is a woman who was a successful broadcast journalist and a helicopter pilot before she married the world’s 3rd richest man. Does that make her a saint? Of course not. But as this piece by the The Persistent about her says, the expression “social climber” has no male equivalent. Read the article, it’s spot on.
I will leave you with this heart warming photograph of a survivor of the Hiroshima A Bomb, holding her daughter, born one year after the bombing. It’s the last photo of the museum, and it’s so sad and hopeful at the same time. Original photo by Shunkichi Kikuchi, Courtesy of Harumi Tago for the Hiroshima Peace memorial Museum.
Sending love and peace,
Patricia