Hope, Not Fear
Some people find the prospect of Trump's small hands on the nuclear button particularly unsettling, but the capacity to destroy the world and the notion that a nuclear war might in any sense be winnable made Washington a "crazytown" long before he hit the Oval Office. The United States may not have detonated a nuclear warhead as an act of war since August 1945, but it's spent an incredible fortune endlessly developing its nuclear arsenal and continues to do so. The 30-year "modernization" of that arsenal alone (started under the president who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his urge to abolish them) is expected to cost some $1.7 trillion dollars. And the U.S. has already been spending about $20 billion a year to maintain the U.S. nuclear advantage and that is set to increase under President Trump.
As the dangers and the dollars rise, nuclear weapons aren't even a concern or a preoccupation around here, much less a worry. They represent little but minor background noise in this country. Catastrophic climate change is so much more likely to claim front-page real estate these days with the epic storms, fires, and floods that occur ever more often. But the big question is: What do we do about it (especially in the age of Donald Trump)? How do we conquer our fears with action? And what kind of action will that be?
Those are hard questions to answer. My parents answered them one way and even though their answers terrified me, I appreciate that they tried -- and that, at 78, my mother is still trying. (She is in jail now, awaiting trial for trespass and property destruction at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia.)
Save the cheetahs almost seems simple by comparison!
The human polluting of the planet with the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels represents a slower-paced Armageddon than the red-button pushing "we begin bombing in five minutes" of thermonuclear warfare. But they are both too big for any one of us to hold alone: me or you or my six-year-old son. Today, at 44, facing a world in which there are now two forms of potential humanly induced global annihilation -- the fast and slow ones -- I don't simply want to dump them on Seamus.
It's true that the last decades have brought us closer to the nuclear brink even as the world slowly warms toward another kind of annihilation entirely, but for so many, fear doesn't activate. It doesn't lead to meaningful change. In fact, it's just as likely to shutter us all in.
So I don't want my son's fears to be my starting point -- or his. I want to start with his love, his hope. Save the cheetahs!
Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New London, Connecticut.
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Copyright 2018 Frida Berrigan
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