Word Count: 2,122 Words
©2007 by Kari Ann Owen
Facing Nuclear War
by Kari Ann Owen
In the Spring of 2006, I became aware of a vast shift in American nuclear policy – one that not only allows but apparently advocates first use of nuclear weapons (see http://www.cdi.org/nuclear/counterproliferation-conference.cfm) against Iran. Alarmed, even horrified, I contemplated the escalatory (how fast would it spread?) possibilities emerging from such evil stupidity and wrote a published letter to my then-local newspaper in Saint Helena, California. Saint Helena is as far removed from nuclear conflict as one might imagine, and shines like an amethyst in the midst of the grape-growing region of the Upper Napa Valley. I then talked to our county’s Disaster Relief Director about what would happen to our valley should Travis Air Force Base, about forty miles from Saint Helena, be targeted. The director informed me that he could not even get Napa Valley residents to purchase a thirty five dollar earthquake preparedness kit, much less worry about an air force base forty miles away.
However, since I was teaching horseback riding to disabled men and women and children at a stable only eight miles from Travis, and since many of our volunteers and students and their parents came from there, I could not feel as resigned as our Disaster Relief Director and wrote a short screenplay, a visual poem with a narrative directly addressing President Bush (who coincidentally had just visited a resort in Saint Helena) pleading for a change in nuclear policy which would spare the lives of my students, our program’s horses, the Napa Valley and the world. This film is going into pre-production now, as three American carrier groups are present in the Persian Gulf ( please see http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/626).
Facing nuclear war means facing the possibility of my own death. At age 58, having survived challenges ranging from violent crime to the death of my beloved husband, I am furious at my helplessness and even more furious at the slumbering expediency of Congressional officials who seem willing to choose between the survival of humanity vs. the survival of their political reputations (please see http://antiwar.com/hirsch/)… with the exception of a few courageous elected officials. These heroic few haven’t forgotten the defenseless humanity they allegedly represent, who would die a hideous and unprotected death in a nuclear war. I cannot understand the informed yet indifferent men and women who could do something but won’t. Don’t they remember waiting for the dawn during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if dawn would arrive and if it would be illuminated by a mushroom cloud? Have none of them ever experienced death as imminent, either through illness or criminal violence – or a loved one’s experience of the same? Are our leaders so arrogant, so filled with a mad sense of invulnerability that they believe not even a policy mistake, much less a deliberately provocative nuclear policy can destroy them?
Throughout my life, I have known children and adults who believed in their superiority and invulnerability absolutely. Powerful cliques in schools, camps and adult social and professional situations always seem to have or have had at least one would-be pathetic god whom no one, even authorities, would contradict or criticize, much less restrain. If the world were an American high school, President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their intellectual gangsters who continue to advocate first use of nuclear weapons against Iran would approximate the leaders of those cliques. How ridiculous they would seem if I could stop checking the news online every morning to see if we have bombed Iran yet.
Are there any words in any language which can deter them? Nobel laureates have pleaded with them (please see http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcnuclear.asp). Protestors in many nations have shouted and sung their fear and anger. Even men and women within the American government have made their views known… that war against Iran is insupportable from every possible point of view, and our exhausted troops in Iraq, may God save them, are in no position to extend themselves any further. Yet, the machine rolls forward and I pray every night for God to spare the good should He become so disgusted as to let the wicked die. And I know that one reason this is happening is that we Americans have been silent too often when non-American lives were, have been deemed politically and militarily expendable, and that the shadow of our cruel silence must somehow, at some point fall upon ourselves. Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Lumumba in the Congo, Allende in Chile and the slaughtered masses in Vietnam, East Timor, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, and the Jews of Europe during World War Two whom we would not admit to these shores must have something to say to God as they plead for a justice they were not granted on Earth.
Add to that my own list. As a vet’s kid, I remember my birthfather’s wired-on arm, devastated and somehow sewn back at Walter Reed Army Hospital after a World War Two army vehicle collision in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was sent to Sacramento, California, awaiting embarkation to Japan, where doctors did not carry arms in combat. When the bomb was dropped on other human expendables, he was saved. And I remember my friends, my loves… courageous survivors of various American wars, particularly the Vietnam War. JD, the one love of my life (before my husband), almost died in my arms during a coughing spasm. JD had been exposed to Agent Orange and had contracted cancer, which metastasized into his lungs and then the rest of his body. I held him up, God knows how. Love makes us stronger. Why can’t it assuage the pain of my love’s near-death in my living room? These memories are not made easier by knowing that millions of courageous lovers, relatives, friends have gone through much worse over a much longer time.
I would like President Bush to have seen JD in the throes of the consequences of a toxic battlefield. Maybe my love’s strangled coughing and the ravages of that six foot two inch two hundred pound body would illustrate what words cannot. Would the sight of my blind, mobility-impaired, autistic and attention deficit disordered riding students prod our President toward mercy and away from a first use nuclear policy, from threatening the Russians with new missile “defense” system and possibly cornering them into pre-emption? Would it even spur him toward an evaluation of the passive genocide which might be the most correct term for what our government did for New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina…. for the poor residents of the Ninth Ward, whose lives President Bush would never deign to even imagine, much less care about.
Is the monstrous abandonment of these people a preview of what we can expect, should a nuclear attack on Iran escalate into general war, which it almost certainly will, given the panic among all nations which will almost certainly ensue? Those few people in a position to stop this march toward annihilation seem indifferent, invulnerable in their belief that having achieved a certain level of income and status, they cannot be harmed. Those of us who are fully aware can do nothing except speak and write and stockpile our earthquake or other emergency kits, none of which will have any effect if San Francisco International Airport, Oakland and San Jose International Airports and the City of San Francisco and Lawrence Livermore Lab are attacked. I have no fantasies of soothing myself with bottled water from my emergency kit during the Holocaust, although I can imagine myself hearing the missiles and bombers approaching and the sirens going off while I yell, “Emergency dismount, please!” to my riding students and their parents and our volunteers. My fantasy ends there because everything else would end there.
In 1978 while writing my doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust and Crucifixion, I stood before my books by and about survivors of the concentration camps, and as many books about the history of the Second World War – including some less publicized histories of the nexus of trans-national financial and other organizations which helped the Nazis build their war machine. These Americans and their British and other friends seem mad as Bush to me now – did they really imagine if the Nazis won, they would not be murdered along with the rest of the non-Nazi world? Did they honestly imagine that their money and collaboration with absolute evil would render them invulnerable, as if their flesh were Kevlar and their bones were granite? Did they really believe they would be left alone to rule a destroyed America and United Kingdom? (“I don’t care what you do, just spare Lord & Taylor’s and Saks and my house in the Hamptons or Greenwich or Martha’s Vineyard. Oh, and don’t forget Tiffany’s and the New York Yacht Club!” Maybe Prescott Bush offered to have a couple of Hitler Youth admitted to Yale and inducted into Skull & Bones.)
I stood before my books and prayed for a different course for present humanity, even in the midst of our general helplessness before mad power. And I embraced a vision of God refusing to abandon his People.
I was twenty nine years old then. I am fifty-eight now, and believe that God’s compassionate vision requires our partnership. Sorry, God, we haven’t been doing too well: that childish maniac of a President seems as delusional as the screaming schizophrenics who make book-shopping an ordeal on Telegraph Avenue. I don’t begrudge those wounded, smelly souls a thing; I want them to have what they need. I don’t even begrudge President Bush his wealth, security or his ranch; if he would go back to Texas and realize his original dream of becoming Baseball Commissioner, I wouldn’t think about him.
What I do begrudge is the abstractedness from human vulnerability of Bush’s so-called warrior intellectuals, who have conceptualized a first strike American nuclear policy from the safe perch of their think-tank, the Project for a New American Century . Some of the signatories to the Project’s Statement of Principals (please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Signatories_to_Statement_of_Principles) were, like me, born Jewish. I cannot grasp their sense of invulnerability to war, particularly genocidal war, in the face of our family histories. Nor can I grasp their use of education to condemn humanity. How many of them, like me, would never have been born, or survived our childhoods, had our grandparents or parents not been able to emigrate from Europe? My birthfather’s parents came to the United States from Wodz, Poland at the turn of the twentieth century, leaving a community which lost ninety percent of its people to the Nazis. I grew up with full and agonized knowledge of that history, and remember today the blue tattooed numbers on our tailor, Mr. Marshall’s, arm. And I remember the ball of flesh hanging from the face of another camp survivor who passed me on the street of our tree-lined, gorgeous Flatbush neighborhood. My birthfather’s war injury; his ancestor in Poland, who had died of a heart attack while the Germans were invading his house; a woman ancestor who was bayoneted and lived to bear children; my birthmother’s Civil War ancestor who was captured and somehow survived incarceration in Libby Prison… I remember my ancestors as if I had met them personally. And I wish that I could have talked with Mr. Marshall about his experiences and survival. I was too shy, at the time; polite little girls didn’t question adults.
It is way past time to start questioning now. What is the President’s time table for the end of the world? What does he intend to do with dissenters, should there be any time to dissent? Do we have any time before Bush leaves office (with a bang?) to secure our futures?
What worked in the sixties and seventies against legalized racial segregation and another war-mad American regime might work now. What else can, but an aware America demanding its and the world’s right of survival? Every elected official’s future should depend on their immediate willingness to impeach this regime, because our general future really does depend on it.
Just because our present government is deaf does not, should not allow us to be silent. Let us disengage our headsets; log off the Internet; turn off the death worshiping television programs and “music” and walk out of violent movies, demanding our money and our sanity. Let us ask ourselves why we spend irreplaceable resources on those who assure us that death is not real when a man of stunning immaturity and low intellectual preparation is President. We have feasted on myths of false resurrection, from coming attractions to the Rapture, while universal murder is being not only advocated but prepared.
Let us not wait until our eyes are burning in a nuclear fireball to wake up. We can do this. We must do it now.
