Seamus and I could head deeper into the world of the potentially vanishing cheetah. I could find a cheetah sanctuary in southern Africa and encourage him to use his piggy bank coins to "adopt" one of those cats. But I haven't gone there yet. I haven't told him why cheetahs are teetering on the edge of oblivion. We haven't started talking about why people kill such animals for sport or how increasingly few truly wild corners of this planet are left for "wild animals."
Still, I must admit that, after our conversation, I started to wonder why I hadn't taken his cheetah angst and turned it into the sort of teachable moment that parents are supposed to love when it comes to all that's wrong in the world. Could my mind have been shuddering and shuttering at the same time? Might I have feared sinking into an abiding helplessness in the face of catastrophic climate change and passing that on to my son?
I mean... what in the world can I -- or Seamus -- really do about the fate of the cheetah? About the fate of the whole miraculous wild world? What in the world could I really teach my child to do?
I don't want you to think that our family does nothing. My husband and I do what we can and frame it for our kids in the context of ecological responsibility. We live below the poverty line in intentional simplicity. We grow vegetables and conserve water. We eat a largely vegetarian diet, compost, and brew our own beer. We have solar panels and we shower only when necessary. We live in a dense urban area and can both walk to work. We don't fly a lot and drive only when necessary. None of these are exactly radical sacrifices, but they are not nothing either.
Still, they aren't faintly enough to save the cheetahs... or ourselves, for that matter.
Two Minutes to Midnight
Remembering my own fears as a six year-old, my son's seem decontextualized and vague. And thank God for that. As a child, I lived in concentrated, daily, physical dread of nuclear war.
When I was six years old, in 1980, the Cold War was still a hot worry and, for reasons I'll explain, I already lived in terror of becoming extinct.
In that very year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsmoved the hands of its famed Doomsday Clock from nine to seven minutes to nuclear midnight, chiding the Soviet Union and the United States for acting like "'nucleo-holics, drunks who continue to insist that the drink being consumed is positively 'the last one,' but who can always find a good excuse for 'just one more round.'"
In the spring of 1979, my family and I had driven from our home in Baltimore to the mountains of West Virginia to stay with friends after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a critical meltdown. We lived less than a two-hour drive from that ill-fated plant, which went critical on March 28th -- just days before my fifth birthday. We stayed with our friends for two weeks. I have a vague memory that their similarly aged daughter and I had the same flowered corduroy overalls and bonded over how painful wearing our hair in pigtails could be.
But mostly I was afraid. So afraid. Nuclear disaster seemed both real and imminent to me then -- and no wonder I felt that way. My parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, were well-known antinuclear activists, as well as members of a radical Christian community of people committed to nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear culture. In those days, it seemed to me that all they did was focus on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, while experimenting with different ways to get other people to acknowledge the terrible danger we were all in. Their daily focus was on rising up against those who were making the bad decisions that left this planet prone to a nuclear Armageddon instead of ensuring a future for all of us.
At six, I already had a front row seat at their experiments. Or, more accurately, there were no seats. Like everyone else, I stood. Over and over and over again, I watched as my parents and their friends and fellow travelers in the peace movement of that time made dramatic, noisy, provocative messes all over Washington, D.C., and beyond. They dug graves on the parade ground at the Pentagon. They made giant cardboard warheads painted with the American and Soviet flags and set them afire in front of the building that housed the Pentagon's nuclear division.
Men dressed as specters screamed, moaned, and laughed maniacally, while other friends dusted themselves with ashes and writhed on the ground in front of the White House. Women cut off their hair and burned it in a bowl on the steps of the Pentagon's river entrance (from which I can still conjure up the cloying, sick smell of nuclear death that wafted over us that morning). I can remember my father -- more than once -- pulling a bottle of blood from his coat pocket and hurling it as high as he could at the pillars of the Pentagon, so that it would drip dramatically down the white marble.
My parents and their friends made such messes at least 100 times in attempting to remind a distracted public that nuclear war could be imminent and that it was both unwinnable and close to inevitable unless the two superpowers made the decision to disarm. I certainly wasn't their target audience, but I doubt anyone saw what they did more often than me. Most people -- even Pentagon employees -- caught such mini-spectacles just once or twice a year. I saw it repeatedly and nearly 40 years later, I'm still freaking out about it.
After all, today the danger isn't the mutual assured destruction tango of the massive superpowers. There are nine nuclear weapons states with an estimated 14,500 nuclear weapons and quarrels aplenty between some of them. Just imagine that in a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan up to 20 million people could die from the blasts, fire, and radiation, while a nuclear winter could be triggered in which, it is believed, up to a billion people might starve to death. And keep in mind that the technology has been democratized to a point where some analysts fear that a "dirty bomb" detonated by some non-state actor might be more likely than an Israeli or Pakistani nuclear strike or, for that matter, a post-Cold War faceoff between the Russians or the Chinese and ourselves.
Keep in mind as well that we're no longer at seven minutes to nuclear midnight. We're now at two minutes, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the clock is still ticking. As the president and CEO of that publication put it at the beginning of this year: "In 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago -- and as dangerous as it has been since World War II."
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