Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The Planet Is Only Getting Hotterhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/the-planet-is-only-get-hotter/Frida BerriganAug 17, 2023

We can’t keep being the human beings who live to destroy.

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August 17, 2023

The Planet Is Only Getting Hotter

We can’t keep being the human beings who live to destroy.

Frida Berrigan
A storm in the Angeles National Forest looks like clouds on fire.

A storm in the Angeles National Forest looks like clouds on fire.

(David McNew / Getty Images)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Too hot.

Too dry.

Too many weapons.

This world needs changing.

But that’s too vague. After all, this world is already changing, just not in ways that are good for you and me.

You know the facts. July 2023 was the hottest month on record—ever—since we humans started keeping track of the temperature. And it’s only getting hotter. As Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, told The New York Times, the recent all-too-extreme weather is just “a foretaste of the future.”

Declaring War on Ourselves

It’s not raining. Not at least where (and when) so many of us need it for drinking water or agriculture or recreation. Uruguay is out of water, with the government prioritizing data centers and multinational corporations instead of its thirsty people. In South Africa, the government is proposing purifying water from abandoned mines as a solution to a protracted water crisis and lack of drinking water. People in cities like Flint, Mich., and Jackson, Miss., know what that feels like. It’s not just thanks to natural shortages, but mismanagement, corporate misdeeds, lack of investment in critical infrastructure, and racism, all mixed with climate change. And that’s only the beginning. Dozens of metropolises are in danger of ending up with contaminated or scarce drinking water (or both). Worse yet, when it does rain, it’s killing and destroying like the flash floods in Vermont a month or so ago or in China’s partly devastated capital, Beijing, and environs just recently.

And if nature taking aim at us weren’t enough, it seems that we’ve declared war on ourselves. Not just in places like Ukraine or Sudan, where the death tolls are in the thousands, but closer to home, too, where Americans are madly over-armed with nearly 400 million guns. I’m thinking about our cities and towns, highways and byways, schools and synagogues. After all, according to the Gun Violence Archive, such weaponry has killed more than 24,000 people so far this year alone (and that’s already more than the number of civilians killed in Ukraine and Sudan combined).

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It’s as if we are at war, but the enemy is us.

It’s enough to make you hide under the covers, turn up your air conditioning (if you have it), and give up. But that, it turns out, just makes things worse. After all, cranking up the AC is part of what left us teetering at the edge of irreversible climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, research into loneliness suggests that isolation only creates more suspicion and further retards our ability to connect.

Still, is it all so bad, so completely awful that it’s not even worth trying anymore?

Here are the statistics that stay with me from a new study, as reported by the Guardian. “The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things.… Yet since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.” This staggering observation demonstrates the devastating impact human life has had on all life, which leads me to ask: With some large-scale tweaking and significant reorientation, could we humans have a similarly big impact in a positive way? Or at least a similarly big impact in not such a terribly negative one?

Reinventing Myself

Given the giant impression—think major meteor-sized explosion—we humans have made on Planet Earth, could we try something else?

Could we adapt? Change? Continue to evolve? Live differently?

As for myself, microscopic as I am in the giant scheme of things, I’ve made a few small changes in the last year that might have been helpful. As a start, I stopped eating gluten, cut out refined sugar, cut down on alcohol, and limited myself to one cup of coffee a day. Now, I only occasionally eat meat. These were just personal decisions, taken with my aging body and changing metabolism in mind, rather than ones meant for the health of the planet.

Still, small changes of this sort made me think differently, too. I stopped imagining the ideal breakfast as sausage, toast, and eggs, and started thinking about it as collard greens, brown rice, and eggs. There was both surprise and pride there, too, when I found that I could do it, that it wasn’t even very hard. It just took a little thought.

I went from drinking coffee as soon as I woke up until the pot was gone late in the day to making just a single cup. Period. And no, such small changes won’t mitigate climate change or much of anything else. Still, if you told me a year ago that I would be a gluten-free, one-cup-of-coffee kind of person, I would have laughed in your face.

Our planet needs this kind of small-scale change, but it needs so much more than that.

During the 1960s, Spain flooded an eleventh-century town to harness hydroelectric power. When the reservoir was full, you could still see the top of the ancient church tower sticking out of the water. That reservoir provided local drinking water, power, and a place for fishing and tourism. Today, however, in a distinctly overheated, drought-ridden, climate-change-battered Spain, that reservoir is almost empty and the remains of the town are completely dry. As the owner of a small kayaking business there told Bloomberg News, “Everything is very uncertain.” He used to take tourists out on the reservoir to paddle around the submerged ruins. “If the drought keeps on going,” he said, “we’ll have to reinvent ourselves somehow.”

And he’s not alone on this sweltering planet of ours. Sooner or later, we’re all going to have to reinvent ourselves—or else! We can’t keep being the human beings who live to destroy.

Bikes and Pedestrians Are Traffic, Too

Yesterday, I set off to live my day without a car. I rode my bike to an appointment a mile away from my house in New London, Conn. It was hot—low 90s and high humidity—but on my bike there was a breeze. Sweet shady swaths of wind! Then I rode another mile to the post office and back to board a shuttle across the Gold Star Bridge.

That shuttle is an adaptation, too. At the end of April, an accident involving a home-oil delivery truck killed the driver and engulfed the bridge in flames. Traffic was shut down for hours. The bridge reopened later that day to car traffic (120,000 of the gas-guzzlers every 24 hours), but three months later, the bike path for cyclists and pedestrians is still out of commission (no guzzling for us). Instead, I have to board a little bus that can carry two or three bicycles and a dozen pedestrians that gets us safely across the bridge. It’s free and on time and an acknowledgment that cyclists and pedestrians are “traffic,” too, but it burns gas and takes about three times as long as my usual pedal. My mother is in a nursing home on the other side of that bridge and seeing her is a big part of my days.

I used to bike to her. Now, I have to bike-shuttle-bike. No need for the gym. In this broiling summer, I come home completely drenched in sweat.

Still, that shuttle aside, greater car-lessness (or fossil-fuel-burning-lessness) is doable, but it requires a mental change. It means accepting that it’s okay to be sweaty, to need a second shirt, to build in extra time to get from point A to point B (which, in fact, you really have to do with a car, too, given how bad traffic can be). I know everyone can’t ride a bike everywhere, but even doing a little of it reminds me that cars are a relatively recent invention and that we should be able to figure out new—or very old—ways of doing things.

Walking. Walking is good for us in every single way and most of us simply don’t do enough of it.

What else can I change? What else can I do? That urgent question asserts itself constantly, even though I know that I’m not exactly the world’s biggest polluter. The United States military has that scandalous distinction. As Neta Crawford points out in her 2022 book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions, the military has been responsible for as much as 80% of federal energy consumption since 2001—the year the Bush administration launched the Global War on Terror. So, really, one striking way to improve the planet is to work for nuclear disarmament, lower military spending, and a smaller US military footprint throughout the world.

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But while we are working on that, I can also be much more deliberate about driving (until we can afford to get an electric vehicle), especially since my family lives in a small town. The kids and I now walk the mile to their camp every day and my 9-year-old and 11-year-old are clearly up for walking on their own. Our commitment to walking only messed with us once, when the camp staff sent out the wrong morning meeting place and we arrived on foot three miles from where we were supposed to be. A nice mom offered to drive us the rest of the way.

Earlier this summer on vacation, I walked Scotland’s West Highland Way with my husband, my sister, my brother, and their spouses. The six of us trekked more than 90 miles along that ancient Scottish trail. We climbed mountains, followed the edges of lochs, crossed sheep fields, and cut through moors, including Rannoch, the largest wild area in Great Britain—more than 50 square miles of heather and bog.

Yes, we arrived from the U.S. by plane, but being outside all day on foot put me in a contemplative state of mind about our world. I was brought to tears by the beauty, the sheer scale and breadth of green that we encountered—until we turned a corner and were confronted with muddy destruction. The trees were gone, all of them, replaced by tiny saplings growing out of tire treads. This, it turned out, wasn’t just a forest. It was managed—trees produced to be cut down and milled by the massive Scottish timber industry.

In truth, the real world—the one that’s made our planet such a mess—was never far from us as we played at being hobbits, minstrels, or nomads. We walked through what seemed like unfamiliar landscapes, but each footfall followed so many others. I was never alone, even when I slowed down and gathered wool from the fences and weeds, tucking clumps of it into the side pocket of my backpack. I was, in fact, walking in the history of this unfamiliar land. Part of our route was along Wade’s Road, built by hundreds of soldiers over more than a decade to help the British put down the Jacobite Rebellions in the 1700s. They fought then over who chose their kings: God or humans! Wars back then were so silly, weren’t they? (Unlike those today, ha ha!)

There were drainage pipes and stairways and bridges, all evidence of the investment the Scottish government and park stewards had put into the West Highland Way as a generator of tourist dollars. And then there were the people. When we stopped for lunch or paused to take off our raincoats for the eighth or ninth time, groups of trekkers from Belgium, Holland, France, and so many other places passed by with quiet greetings.

The West Highland Way turns out to be a giant cash generator for the Scottish government. Those streams of people who come to walk there and stay in the bed-and-breakfast inns, drink in the pubs, and buy the band-aids (they call them “plasters”) and potato chips (“crisp packets”) inject 5.5 million pounds sterling into local economies along the way.

And in the end, all of it, sadly enough—walking or not—helps feed the burning of this planet.

One Foot in Front of the Other

So how do we keep going when the future is so uncertain and full of dread? One advantage of just walking is you just walk. You don’t think about the future at all, just the next footfall. In our normal lives, we spend so much time trying to escape the elements—rain delays, events postponed, heat an ever-increasing factor in our summer planning—but in Scotland, we just kept walking.

Now that I’m home, I’ve done the same. I find walking in my community a great antidote to despair about the world. We don’t have AC, so these days, it’s often cooler (or at least breezier) outside our house than in it.

Who walks in this heat? Poor people, people with dogs, and health enthusiasts. I don’t feel hopeless when I’m walking. I feel connected, attentive, and activated. I’m too busy noticing the world, feeling my body, and keeping a lookout for cars (and bikes!).

Admittedly, on a planet already heating to startling extremes, it’s not much and we desperately need the groups now organizing against climate change (just as we need governments and fossil-fuel companies to revolutionize their priorities and operations, as well as a dismantling of the military-industrial complex). But it’s not nothing either.

I know that walking in an oven world doesn’t end wars, but it doesn’t use the oil that so many of our wars are fought over. The climate won’t cool just because I’m walking more. The world-to-come for my children won’t broil less because of the tiny things I’m doing in my life. But it won’t get worse while I’m walking either. And in the quiet contemplation of walking, maybe a new idea will spring forth.

We can at least hope, as the work and the walking continue. It’s a scary world to walk through when you realize that the enemy is us.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/the-planet-is-only-get-hotter/
The Doomsday Clock Has Never Been So Close to Midnighthttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/doomsday-clock-nuclear-war-russia/Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganApr 12, 2023

I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon—to the proverbial “midnight.”

When it comes to TikTok content providers, I wouldn’t normally think of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It’s a deeply serious organization founded in 1945 by physicists in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was invented two years later by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf as a way of graphically illustrating the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. In its 76 years of existence, its hands have been moved 25 times, but never more ominously than in January of this year!

And no need to look further than TikTok to see what happened. Amid all the tweens trying to jumpstart the next viral craze, a 30-second video features five representatives of the Bulletin‘s science and security board frozen in place as a voice intones: “We move the clock forward, the closest it has ever been to midnight.” Then two of them pull a cloth off it and add, “It is now 90 seconds to midnight.”

On TikTok, versions of this video got hundreds of thousands of “likes” and thousands of comments. Mind you, that’s a blip compared to the videos of even minor celebrities. Still, I found myself scrolling through the comments, many of them versions of “Does this mean I don’t have to pay my mortgage/bills/ taxes?” Others had lines like “Someone call the Avengers” or asked if it had anything to do with Taylor Swift’s Midnights album. This being the Internet, there was all too much cursing and all too many oblique emojis, as well as people poking fun at the awkward staging and long stretch of silence in the video.

Mixed with such inanity were expressions of genuine fear, confusion, and distress over the possible immanence of nuclear war. That is, of course, what the clock, as a salient piece of public art, is supposed to do: generate conversation, spark inquiry, and lead to action. As artist Sam Heydt observes, the Doomsday Clock should remind us that “the edge is closer than we think. In a time marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic, and climate change, the future isn’t what it used to be.”

Tick, Tock Indeed!

One hallmark of TikTok is reaction videos where creators split the screen to show their response. In one, a young white woman reacts this way: “Are we supposed to be scared? My generation is never going to have retirement, never going to own a home. I’m living in a van.” I get it; there’s so much that seems more immediate in our world: school shootings, police violence, bank collapses, and inflation, to name just a few. Who even has time to notice now that the future isn’t what it used to be?

But embedded somewhere in any of those in-your-face issues, whether we know it or not, are nuclear weapons, threatening the end to it all. Certainly, the Pentagon knows it, since (whether you’ve noticed or not), it continues to invest your tax dollars in nuclear weapons, big time. Between 2019 and 2028, the United States is on track to spend at least $494 billion on its nuclear forces, or about $50 billion a year, according to a Congressional Budget Office assessment. Analysts actually estimate that Pentagon plans to “modernize”—yes, that’s the term—its nuclear arsenal could cost you as much as $1.5 to $2 trillion in the coming decades.

The clock has never been so close to midnight and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is using every tool at its disposal to keep clanging the alarm bell. It even has a Doomsday Clock playlist on Spotify, while its 90-second clock announcement was briefly front-page news at The Washington Post (the front of their Science section, anyway) and The New York Times. Still, we live in such an atomized (excuse me for that!) and polarized media environment that it’s increasingly hard to penetrate the noise cloud.

Nuclear weapons, once a top-of-the-line issue for so many Americans, have faded into, at best, a background hum. So, I wonder, what happens after the Doomsday Clock reaches midnight? What’s next for that metaphor? Or as the seconds are shaved away amid a war in Ukraine that could always go nuclear, is it time for an entirely new metaphor, something (excuse me again!) more explosive?

Then, of course, there’s that other great danger to us all, climate change, which, it seems, doesn’t even need a metaphor. The alarm of raging wildfires, unbelievable floods, megadroughts, fiercer storms, fast-melting glaciers, and disappearing rivers leaves the very idea of metaphors in the dust. Climate scientists are blunt to the point of bruising on this. What part of “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” don’t you understand? That, of course, is what the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted with “high confidence.” Tick, tock, indeed!

Come to think of it, maybe nuclear weapons don’t need a new metaphor either. After all, we already have the mushroom cloud, the haunted eyes of that child in Hiroshima, the shadow of a dead person left on that rock, and the unnatural silence that followed the wall of sound and flame incinerating thousands of human beings in an instant. That’s no exaggeration. That was Hiroshima in 1945.

In 2023, when we consume news and images in almost real-time, it’s hard to imagine that the now-iconic images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were censored and treated as contraband by our government at the time. It wasn’t until 1952 that the searing images of photographer Yoshito Matsushige were finally published, first in the Japanese magazine Asahi Gurafu and then in Life magazine. And there’s so much that none of us will ever see. After all, Matsushige spent 10 hours walking through his devastated city of Hiroshima but took only seven pictures. “It was such a cruel site,” he said later, “that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”

It’s Three Minutes to Midnight and You Want to Do What?

I recently met a group of college students from all over the country. To my shock, none of them seemed to have heard of nuclear weapons before I mentioned them. I couldn’t relate. I’m no Martyl Langsdorf, but thanks to my family, I’ve grown up with the Doomsday Clock in a way few other people have. I don’t remember a day of my life that I haven’t thought about nukes and this country’s ability to literally obliterate humanity.

Some dads say things like “money doesn’t grow on trees” when their kids ask for permission to see a film. My dad was Phil Berrigan, a nuclear abolitionist and peace activist. So, he would say: “It’s three minutes to nuclear midnight and you want to go to the movies?” Imagine living as if your personal choices made a difference when it came to nuclear war. That’s certainly how my parents and their friends in the Catholic Left lived and how a small subculture continues to live today.

My mom and dad, Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, a former nun and a priest, refused to pay “war taxes,” trespassed onto military installations to protest our world-ending ways, held vigils at weapons manufacturing plants, and protested during the stockholder meetings of giant weapons-making corporations, while taking care of the victims of skewed US policies by organizing soup lines and opening their doors to the unhoused.

By reminding me of where the hands on the Doomsday Clock stood at any moment, my dad helped me integrate concerns about nuclear weapons into my daily life. He helped me measure out the energy I had for any worry. I mean, why fork over $8 (now $28?) at a movie box office to get scared by a horror story on the celluloid screen when the real world is scary enough for free?

76 Years of the Doomsday Clock in 25 Moves

So nuclear timekeeping started in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight.

By 1949, as the Cold War heated up and the Soviet Union got the bomb, the hands on that clock were moved to three minutes to midnight, code for distinctly too close! As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote after Russia exploded its first nuclear device, “We think that Americans have reason to be deeply alarmed and prepare for grave decisions.” The nuclear arms race was off and running.

In 1953, after the United States and the Soviets developed and tested massive hydrogen bombs, those hands were moved to two minutes.

In 1960, sustained international cooperation and the successful negotiation of arms control treaties between the superpower rivals compelled the scientists to move the clock hands back to seven minutes to midnight.

In 1963, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and the terror of near-nuclear war, the United States and the USSR signed new agreements, ending atmospheric nuclear tests. The world sighed with relief as the clock was moved back to 12 minutes.

But in 1968, as the Vietnam War fanned global tensions, the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal, and France and China both developed nuclear weapons, it was at seven minutes again.

Nineteen sixty-nine brought another sigh of relief as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and the nations with such weaponry committed to future nuclear disarmament talks. The clock inched back to 10 minutes.

In 1972, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the disarmament agreement that came to be known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, the clock made it to 12 minutes.

My Life and the Doomsday Clock

In 1974, however, India tested a nuclear device painfully code-named “Smiling Buddha” and that minute hand was moved to nine again. I was born just a few weeks before that Indian test, which spurred neighbor and rival Pakistan to launch its own nuclear program. By the following summer, my parents would carry my infant brother and me as they marched with friends, hauling full-sized replicas of the nuclear weapons that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the streets of Washington, every day for almost a week to mark the 30th anniversary of the atomic bombings.

In 1981, as the Soviets continued their war in Afghanistan and Americans elected Ronald Reagan as president, the clock ominously moved to four minutes. I was seven and my brother six when our father was sentenced to 10 years in jail (later reduced) for his part in a 1980 action. A group that called itself the Plowshares Eight had walked into the General Electric Space Technology Center in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, with the early morning rush of workers. There, they symbolically disarmed some model nuclear weapons. Their trial was later made into a movie starring Martin Sheen (with my dad playing himself).

In 1984, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight as President Reagan pumped money into Star Wars technology as a way to win a future nuclear war. Just a month after I turned 10, my mom went on trial for her Plowshares action a year earlier at Griffiss Air Force base in upstate New York. That summer, my family and their friends also tried to maintain a round-the-clock presence at the Pentagon concourse.

In 1988, the Bulletin‘s scientists reset the Doomsday Clock at six minutes to midnight as the work of a growing global antinuclear movement started to deliver dividends in agreements to cut back the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons. That summer, when I was 14, we built a rough, shed-like house and brought it to the Pentagon Parade Ground to call for “homes, not bombs.” We stayed all night and watched the rats take over the Pentagon grounds as it grew dark.

By 1990, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clock was readjusted to 10 minutes to midnight, the furthest from disaster since 1968.

In 1991, in the wake of the Cold War, the United States and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and began to cut back their nuclear arsenals as the Soviet Union faded into history. Appropriately enough, the Bulletin moved the clock to a breathtaking 17 minutes to midnight, writing: “The illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away.”

In 1995, a close call and human error led the scientists to nudge the clock to 14 minutes and, in 1998, nine minutes, while calling on the United States, Russia, and other nuclear states to “fully commit” to “control the spread of nuclear weapons.”

In 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks and growing concerns about loose nuclear materials, the science and security board adjusted the clock to seven minutes. My father died that December, after a lifetime of anti-war activism. He spent the last year of his life trying to jumpstart a “national strike” for nuclear disarmament.

In 2007, after North Korea tested its first nuclear device, the Bulletin moved the clock ominously to five minutes to midnight and the science and security board added human-made climate change to the doomsday formula. In that announcement, they wrote, “As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and at the onset of an era of unprecedented climate change, our way of thinking about the uses and control of technologies must change.… The clock is ticking.”

In 2010, the Bulletin inched the minute hand back up to six, thanks to the Copenhagen accord on climate change and new negotiations between the United States and Russia on arms reductions.

Between six minutes and five minutes to nuclear midnight, I got married, pledging to work for the abolition of such weaponry with my husband, who grew up in southeastern Connecticut, protesting at submarine christenings and launches at a US naval base on the Thames River.

Thanks to new North Korea aggressiveness and general global intransigence on climate-change commitments, 2012 saw a modest drop to five minutes. That was a “time” that took on a new kind of urgency for me after the Sandy Hook school shootings that killed six teachers and 20 kids about the same age as my dear stepdaughter in nearby Newtown, Connecticut. Her school beefed up security in response, checking IDs and barring parents from the building. Every day, when I carried my newborn son to pick up his sister, I had to go through an elaborate process at dismissal time in a state of near panic, flinching at any loud noise and feeling both the fragility of my kindergartener’s life and the threat to all life from nuclear weapons. After all, the Sandy Hook killer had but a small arsenal compared to what the United States threatened the world with every day.

By 2015, Russia and the United States had both announced new spending to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and, in climate terms, it was the hottest year on record. The Bulletin ominously moved the hands of the clock to three minutes to midnight for the first time since the Cold War year of 1984.

By then, I was the mother of two toddlers, born in 2012 and 2014, and my stepdaughter was 9. Those three wonders helped me stay focused on the beauty of each day and the extraordinary web of life that the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet eternally hold hostage. I recommitted myself then to taking the nuclear threat seriously, but without hectoring my kids about the Doomsday Clock the way my dad had done with me.

In 2017, the Bulletin moved those clock hands 30 seconds closer to midnight, its first half-minute move ever in response to President Donald Trump’s inflammatory nuclear rhetoric, soaring Pentagon budgets, and new threats to the global climate.

A year later, in 2018, we lost another 30 seconds and the clock hit two minutes to midnight, as the Bulletin pointed out that international diplomacy had been “reduced to name-calling, US-Russia relations featured more conflict than cooperation, the Iran deal was imperiled, and greenhouse gas emissions rose anew.”

Though no longer a kid, I still found myself watching a parent being hauled off to jail. This time, it was my mother, then 79, arrested for trespassing with six friends at the Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia in a move to symbolically disarm the Trident nuclear submarines there.

In 2020, the Bulletin’s clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight, while citing the two existential dangers of climate change and nuclear weapons in its press statement.

Over the next two years, the magazine did something new. It didn’t change the hands on the clock but issued press releases about why they remained at 100 seconds. Meanwhile, in 2021, the kids and I helped make 68 signs thanking each of the nations that had adopted the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. My kids poured their hearts into those works of art, adorning them with silver paint and sparkles. That treaty celebration day in New London where we live was cold and windy and the two little ones were almost hidden behind their signs, while they asked me lots of questions about Honduras and the island of Nauru which I gamely tried to answer without resorting to Wikipedia. An adage attributed to Mark Twain came to my mind then: “War is how Americans learn geography.” I smiled, thinking that my kids were learning geography through protest and peacemaking.

And then, this January, the Bulletin‘s science and security board again shaved the time by seconds, announcing that it was now 90 seconds to midnight.

What’s Next (Or Do I Mean Last)?

In the 76 years since its creation, the minute and second hands of the Doomsday Clock have moved 25 times, back and forth—tick, tock, tick, tock—from 17 minutes to midnight at its furthest from imminent danger to the present 90 seconds to midnight. What lies on the other side of midnight?

On a normal clock, 12:01 would simply begin a new day, a new chance to learn from the past and adjust your path to the future. The question now is whether such a 12:01, a future without the Doomsday Clock, without the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change is even imaginable.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/doomsday-clock-nuclear-war-russia/
How to Survive Our Apocalyptic Futurehttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/nuclear-war-generation-z/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganNov 8, 2022

When I was growing up, there was a parody of an old-fashioned public announcement tacked to the wall of our kitchen that I vividly remember. It had step-by-step instructions for what to do “in case of a nuclear bomb attack.” Step 6 was “bend over and place your head firmly between your legs”; step 7, “kiss your ass goodbye.”

That shouldn’t be surprising, since my parents, Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, once-upon-a-time priest and nun, were well-known antinuclear activists. I was too young to be a part of the “duck-and-cover generation” who, at school, practiced hiding from a nuclear attack beneath their desks or heading for local bomb shelters in the basements of churches and town halls.

Born in 1974, I think of myself as a member of The Day After generation, who were instructed to watch that remarkably popular made-for-TV movie in 1983 and report on our observations and feelings. Dramatizing the life of people in a small town in Kansas after a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, it made a strong (if perhaps unintentional) case that dying in the initial blast would have been better than surviving and facing the nuclear winter and over-armed chaos that followed.

In this Ukraine War era, maybe we could label today’s kids as the Generation Fed Up With Grown Ups (Gen Fed Up). The members of Gen Z are “digital natives,” born with smartphones in their hands and instantly able to spot all the messy seams in, and agendas behind, poorly produced, uninformative Public Service Announcements like the New York City Emergency Management department’s much-pilloried recent PSA about what to do in case of—yep, you guessed it!—a nuclear attack: get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned. (Sounds pretty close to the poster on my wall growing up, doesn’t it?)

Young people need real information and analysis, survival skills and resources. Generation Z and the younger Generation Alpha (I have some of both in my family) are growing up in a world torn apart by the selfishness and shortsightedness of earlier generations, including the impact of the never-ending production and “modernization” of nuclear weapons, not to speak of the climate upheaval gripping this planet and all the horrors that go with it, including sea level rise, megadrought, flooding, mass migration, starvation, and on and on and on…

Jornada del Muerto

The nuclear age began during World War II with the July 16, 1945, test of a six-kilogram plutonium weapon code-named Trinity in the Jornada del Muerto Valley in New Mexico. No one bothered to tell the estimated 38,000 people who lived within 60 miles of that atomic test that it was about to take place or that there might be dangerous nuclear fallout following the blast. No one was evacuated. The area, whose Spanish name in translation means, appropriately enough, “Journey of Death,” was rich in indigenous culture and life, home to 19 American Indian pueblos, two Apache tribes, and some chapters of the Navajo Nation. Though hardly remembered today, they were the first nuclear casualties of our age.

That initial test was quickly evaluated as successful and, less than a month later, American war planners considered themselves ready for the ultimate “tests”—the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki three days later. The initial blasts from those back-to-back bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people on the spot and immediately thereafter, and countless more from radiation sickness and cancer.

Fat Man and Little Boy, as those bombs were bizarrely code-named, should have signaled the end of nuclear war, even of all war. The incineration of so many civilians and the leveling of two major cities should have been motivation enough to put the cork in the deadly power of the atom and consign nuclear weapons to some museum of horrors alongside the guillotine, the rack, and other past devices of obscene torture.

But it would prove to be just the beginning of an arms race and a cheapening of life that goes on to this day. After all, this country continues to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal to the tune of trillions of dollars, while Vladimir Putin has threatened to use one or more of his vast store of “tactical” nukes, and the Chinese are rushing to catch up. I keep thinking about how 77 years of nuclear brinkmanship and impending doom has taken its global toll, even while making life more precarious and helping render this beautiful and complex planet a garbage can for forever radioactive waste. (OK, OK, hyperbole alert… it’s not forever, just literally a million years.)

Some among the duck-and-cover generation feared that they wouldn’t live to see adulthood, that there would be no tomorrow. Not surprisingly, too many of them, when they grew up, came to treat the planet as if there indeed were no tomorrow. And you can see evidence of just that attitude any time you consider the “prosperity” of the second industrial revolution with its toxic sludge of fossil fuels, PCBs, asbestos, lead in paint and gas, and so many plastics. This polluting of our ground, water, and air was all, I suspect, spurred on by a nihilistic nuclearism.

It seems impossible to work so hard to shift from burning carbon to capturing solar or wind power if there’s a chance that it could all go up in a mushroom cloud tomorrow. But there have been some notable efforts from which to draw hope and inspiration as we keep living out those very tomorrows. As environmentalist and futurist Bill McKibben writes in his memoir The Flag, The Cross and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back on His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What The Hell Happened, President Jimmy Carter tried to guide this country to a less carbon-dependent future—and it cost him the presidency. The Carter White House sought to mitigate the damage of the 1979 oil crisis with significant investments in solar power and other green technologies and cutting-edge conservation. Had such policies been allowed to take hold, as McKibben points out, “climate changes would have turned from an existential crisis to a manageable problem on a list of other problems.”

Can you imagine? We love Carter now for his folksy accessibility, moral stamina, and promotion of affordable housing through Habitat for Humanity, but as we doomscroll the latest news about present and future climate catastrophes, we have to reach back through time to even imagine a healthier tomorrow. Sadly enough, with Carter, we might have been near a turning point, we might have had a chance… and then actor (and huckster) Ronald Reagan rode his 10-gallon cowboy hat into the White House, removed the rooftop solar panels the Carters had installed, instituted tax cuts for the very wealthy, and loosened regulations on every type of polluter. President Reagan did that in 1986, only a year or so after the last month of our era that the planet was cooler than average.

Tomorrow

Nineteen eighty-six seems like just yesterday! Now what? How about tomorrow?

After all, here we are in 2022 about to hit 8 billion strong on this planet of ours. And there is, of course, a tomorrow. Hotter and drier but dawning all the same. Wetter and windier but coming anyway.

I have three kids, ages 8, 10 and 15, and they anchor me in a troubling and strange, if still ultimately beautiful, reality. This world, however finite with its increasingly overwhelming problems, is still precious to me and worth a good fight. I can’t turn away from tomorrow. It’s not an abstraction. The headlines now seem to endlessly scream: We are at a potential tipping point in terms of the climate. Did I say a potential tipping point? I meant to make that plural. In fact, an article in the September 8 issue of The Guardian lists 16 of them in all. Sixteen! Imagine that!

Three of the biggest ones that climate scientists agree we’re close to tipping over are:

  1. The collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, which will produce a huge rise in global sea levels.
  2. The collapse of a key current in the northern Atlantic Ocean, which will further disrupt rainfall and weather patterns throughout the world, severely curtailing global food production.
  3. The melting of the Arctic’s carbon-rich permafrost, releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and so further broiling this planet. (Will it freeze again if we do the right thing? Not likely, as it seems as if that tipping point has already tipped.)

In the face of all of this, in the age of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and the rest of the crew, how do you change political or corporate behavior to slow, if not reverse, global warming? More than three-quarters of a century of uncertain tomorrows has made the human race—particularly, of course, those in the developed/industrialized world—awful stewards of the future.

“So when we need collective action at the global level, probably more than ever since the second world war, to keep the planet stable, we have an all-time low in terms of our ability to collectively act together. Time is really running out very, very fast.” So said Johan Potsdam, a scientist with the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. As he added tellingly, speaking of the global temperature ceiling set at the Paris climate accords in 2015 (and already considered out of date in the latest devastating United Nations report), “I must say, in my professional life as a climate scientist, this is a low point. The window for 1.5C is shutting as I speak, so it’s really tough.”

Dire predictions, reams of science, sober calls to act from climatologists and activists, not to speak of island and coastal communities already being displaced by a fast-warming world. Only recently, two young people from the climate movement Last Generation threw mashed potatoes at the glass covering a classic Claude Monet painting in a museum near Berlin in a bid to get attention, while activists from Just Stop Oil used tomato soup on the glass of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London in October. In neither case were the paintings themselves harmed; in both cases, they have my attention, for what that’s worth.

For striking numbers of climate refugees globally, the point has already tipped and, given their situations, they might like to have some tomato soup and mashed potatoes—to eat rather than to be flung as protest props. In the longer term, for their children and grandchildren, they need masses of people in the biggest greenhouse gas polluters—China and the United States top the list —to radically alter their lifestyles to help protect what’s left of this distinctly finite planet of ours.

Yesterday

Thomas Berrigan, my grandfather, was born in 1879. My grandmother Frida was born in 1886. While they missed the preindustrial era by more than 100 years, their early lives in the United States were almost carbon-free. They hauled water, chopped wood, and largely ate from a meager garden. As poor people, their carbon footprint remained remarkably small, even as the pace and pollution of life in the United States and the industrialized West picked up.

My father, Philip Berrigan, born in 1923, was the youngest of six brothers. There could have been two more generations of Berrigans between his birth and mine in 1974, but there weren’t. I could have been a grandmother when I gave birth to my last child in 2014, but I wasn’t. So, in our own way, whether we meant to or not, we slowed down the march of generations and I’m grateful for the long perspective that gives me.

In her later years, my grandmother marveled at the ways in which a car could bring her back and forth to the city “all in one day.” More recently, her great-grandchildren have found that they could still go to school (after a fashion) thanks to computers during the Covid pandemic, communicating in real-time with teachers and classmates scattered elsewhere in our world.

It’s not likely that I’ll live until 2079, my grandfather’s 200th birthday, but his great-granddaughter, my daughter Madeline, will just be turning 65 then. If she has my mother’s longevity, she’ll be 86 when we hit the year 2100, That is the grim milestone (tombstone?) when climate scientists expect that we could reach a disastrous global average temperature of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Unless. Unless something is done, many somethings are done to reverse greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, that spells disaster beyond measure for my children’s children.

When I look at old photos, I see my own face in my mother’s hollowed-out, age-spotted cheeks. And when I look at my daughter’s still chubby cheeks and the way her eyebrows arch, I see my own younger face (and that of my mother’s, too).

As far as I’m concerned, the year 2100 is my future, even though I won’t be here to struggle through it with my children and their children. In the meantime, we keep putting one foot in front of the other (walking is better for the environment anyway) and struggling somehow to deal with this beautiful, broken world of ours. One generation cedes to the next, doing its best to impart wisdom and offer lessons without really knowing what tools those who follow us will need to carve a better tomorrow out of a worsening today.

To go back to the beginning, while such a thing is still possible, if nuclear weapons, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, fossil fuels, and apocalyptic fear helped get us to this breaking point, we need something truly different now. We need not war but peace; not new nukes but next-generation-level diplomacy; not fossil fuels but the greenest of powers imaginable. We need a world that Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and their ilk can’t even imagine, a world where their kind of power is neither needed, nor celebrated.

We need gratitude, humility, and awe at the deep web of interconnection that undergirds the whole of nature. We need curiosity, joy in discovery, and celebration. And our kids (that Gen Fed Up) can help us access those powers, because they’re inherent in all children. So, no more ducking and covering, no more Day After, no more staying inside. Let us learn from Generation Z and Generation Alpha and change—and maybe survive.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nuclear-war-generation-z/
There Are Still Things to Love About Americahttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/america-libraries-citizen-community/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganJul 15, 2022

It’s hot and hazy as July rolls around. Growing up in the Baltimore swamplands, we used to say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Meaning that the humidity was harder to deal with than the feverish temperatures. At some point in my family, the phrase morphed into: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.” At the time, we meant the antics of people when it gets hot, including public drunkenness, mishaps with fireworks, and fights over slights. (These days, sadly enough, you’d have to add to that list slaughtering people at a July 4th celebration with an AR-15-style rifle.)

Worse yet, in 2022, it’s emblematic of a far larger picture of life on earth: the stupidity of trying to stay cool while burning carbon; the stupidity of the Supreme Court tying the collective hands of the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to regulating the emissions of coal-fired power plants; the stupidity of blaming mental illness rather than assault rifles for massacres; the stupidity of a pro-life movement that seems to care about nothing but fetuses. And, of course, the list only goes on and on… and on.

And now, I think I’m breaking into a sweat even though I’m sitting still. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver posted this on Facebook recently:

There are days when I can’t live in this country. Not the whole thing at once, including the hateful parts, the misogyny, the brutal disregard of the powerful for the powerless. Sometimes I can only be a citizen of these trees, this rainy day, the family I can hold safe, the garden I can grow. A fire that refuses to go out.

So, in these hazy, humid days laced with commercial patriotism and an upbeat jingoism shaken loose from the daily struggles of most people, I’m trying to take her words to heart. I am a citizen of the trees, particularly the two plum trees I planted this spring. I am a citizen of the rainy day. (May it come soon!) I am a citizen of my family of five, of eight, of 16, of 150 (the number of people anthropologist Robin Dunbar says we can meaningfully connect with). Yes, it really does seem like that’s what it takes to go on these days—committing yourself to what matters, to what you still do love in this ever more disturbed America of ours.

Above all, I am a citizen of what I love! I resolve to be a citizen of goodness and generosity, competence and kindness. I pledge allegiance, above all, to libraries, used bookstores, community gardens, and the mutual-aid network of my local “Buy Nothing” group. This, sadly enough, is as much of my country, America, that I seem capable of loving in the age of Donald Trump and an all-too-extreme Supreme Court.

So, in an America in which Roe has gone down and gun sales only continue to rise (thank you so much, Supremes!), let me tell you a little about the things I still truly do love in America.

Used Books Stores

I recently ruined a library book! I spilled coffee all over it and there was no way to fix it. When I contacted the library, I was told that there would be a $30 fine to replace it. There was, however, another option: I could find a new copy and bring it in instead. Well, I have more time than money, so I set off to replace the State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny (a propulsive guilty pleasure of a summer read) that I had caffeinated to the hilt.

After checking out three brick-and-mortar used bookstores in my area I found that novel in no time at all for $1.50 (plus $4 shipping) at Alibris, an online used bookstore. But don’t feel bad for the stores that didn’t have a copy of State of Terror. I still spent at least $30 in them, picking up a couple of survival guides, an Octavia Butler novel (another kind of survival guide), graphic novels for my kids, and a few other books that caught my eye—but hopefully won’t catch my next cup of coffee.

There’s something so wholesome about used bookstores. If the $25 billion-plus publishing industry is a slick, cutthroat insider’s game riven with racism and inequity, then used bookstores are its antithesis. They’re all about the pleasure of knowledge, craft, and the word! Nearest to us here in New London, Connecticut, is the Book Barn in Niantic, a network of three stores loosely organized by theme and covered in cat hair. Their haphazard nature rewards curiosity and perseverance. The mismatched chairs and overturned milk crates invite you to pause, peruse, and dive in. When I go there with my family, we chant “five books are enough” before we get out of the car. Then we revise it to five books each (for a total of twenty-five) and, in the end, are likely to buy as many as we can carry. Given such frenzies, we can only afford to go once every few months even though many of the books are only a dollar each and most are less than five dollars. Honestly, how could you not love it?

Libraries

Excuse me for being so book focused, but that’s who I am, I guess. In between trips to used bookstores, we can always go to the library, where you can borrow 50 titles per card at a time! My kids, 8, 10, and 15, are so well known there that the librarian calls us when they leave behind a favorite stuffed animal or jacket (which is like every week).

The New London library is within walking distance of our house. In addition to books, it has a job-search support center, a recently redesigned teen center, and meeting rooms for local groups and events. Patrons can check out free museum passes, use the free services of a notary, and pose any question under the sun to members of its calm, helpful staff. In addition, our library has a couple of surprising offerings, including Memory Kits for people developing dementia and quite a variety of cake pans shaped like cartoon characters, animals, or castles that can be borrowed like any book.

In this way, our library is very trendy. Like ever more libraries, it’s no longer just focused on lending out books. It’s a multi-use facility that hosts community events, serves as a free or low-priced Staples or a WeWork suite with computers, printers, and study carrels. It lends out Roku devices and laptops, while maintaining catalogs of diverse offerings. My sister-in-law, for instance, borrowed catering equipment like chafing trays and large casserole dishes for her son’s graduation party. At some libraries, you can even borrow lawn mowers, weed whackers, and pruning equipment for your garden and lawn. During prom season, some of them are opening dress-lending libraries to help cash-strapped families get strapless!

It’s all so wholesome and delightful that it’s easy to forget just how underfunded and under attack our libraries are. This in a country where, if you love books, you’ve instantly got financial problems, but if you love the military-industrial complex you’re guaranteed to have more money than you know what to do with. In a nearby town, a first selectman demanded that the library remove a copy of Who Is RuPaul? from its collection in response to a parental complaint.

The book, part of a popular series of biographies, tells the story of the performer, producer, personality, and queer icon whose groundbreaking talent has turned drag-queening into mainstream magic. In Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, members of the right-wing armed hate group Proud Boys have tried to interrupt children’s story hours with vitriol and threats of violence. And yet, despite all the hate, librarians just carry on! The library, a bright, functional, welcoming space meant to exist outside of commerce and to be open to all, is one of the last true public spaces in this country, an enduring part of a shrinking commons!

“Buy Nothing” Facebook Groups

I know. I know. Facebook (now Meta) is big, bad tech. Our every cursor move is tracked, our every “like” logged. I should go on a total social-media fast, but I’m not on Instagram or TikTok and I do love to “like” my friends’ cat pictures! Above all, though, I love “Buy Nothing.” That site-specific network—there are groups everywhere—is built around asking, gifting, and gratitude. It’s online neighborliness personified, demonstrating, in the words of its founders, that “true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors.”

The New London Buy Nothing Group on Facebook has more than 1,500 people. It’s administered by a handful of souls who moderate the page to make sure, among other things, that no one feels badgered into choosing certain people for gifts. In the last few days, some members have offered up cats, organic plant fertilizer, and a toilet seat, while others have asked for vintage drinking glasses, a dog crate, and an old cellphone so a nephew can access the Internet.

People respond to all these queries by asking to be chosen, sometimes sharing why they want whatever’s been asked for and how they’ll use it. The gifters get to choose who to give items to and then they make arrangements to pass them on. When I see someone asking for something that I have in excess, I’ll post a picture of it and invite them to reach out and make a plan to pick it up. Things move pretty quickly then. The only time I had no takers, I was offering used school backpacks the same week that the local Rotary Club was giving out brand new ones filled with school supplies. We’re a friendly, dynamic group that stretches from the nicest homes in New London to the Red Roof Inn, a place people stay when they’re experiencing homelessness.

I love thinking about my front porch as a place where people can come to have their needs and wants met. In the last few months, I’ve shared a women’s history puzzle, a pair of kids’ boxing gloves, a mini-pool full of hostas, jars of sourdough starter, and vegetable stock, while collecting yoga mats, chicken wire, rosary beads, an aquarium, and small jam jars from porches and front steps all over town.

When I refer to “the city” of New London, Connecticut, which was founded in the 1600s and burned down by American traitor turned British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold in 1781, it sounds grand indeed. As it happens, though, we’re now actually a small community of about 28,000 people living in a six-square-mile area. In other words, we’re the size of a town.

New London has been known for lots of things, including its arts scene, bar scene, sugar-sand beach, and being the childhood home of playwright Eugene O’Neill. It’s long and thin like a jalapeño pepper and so small that sometimes it feels like I know everyone. Then I find myself driving down a street I’ve never noticed before, searching for the address of the nice person who’s left me a copy of Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) on their porch in a brown paper bag.

Only 2,882 people voted in our last election, but it seems as if twice that many were actively searching for infant formula during the recent shortage. There’s a level of engagement, gratitude, and celebration on New London’s Buy Nothing Facebook page that I always find moving and delightful, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

Community Gardens

A little head of organic lettuce costs almost $3 these days at my local grocery store. A pound of organic strawberries, imported from Mexico, is about $8. Inflation is the word of the day, week, and year. And nowhere is it more obvious than at the checkout counter of my local grocery store. Like so much in this interconnected, fragile, unequal world of ours, we can blame the soaring cost of food on war and the greed of the corporations that call the tune in the global economy.

But far away from such overwhelming disasters is a modest set of raised garden boxes just up the block from my house. They burst with lettuce, strawberries, and a dozen other easy to harvest “snack” crops. And they’re free for the picking! Hand-painted signs in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic encourage passersby to harvest there and eat the food. The “snack boxes” were built and are maintained by a local food justice and youth empowerment organization called FRESH New London. Passersby can harvest the lettuce and strawberries and bring them home to wash and enjoy. They can pick snap peas, okra pods, and a little later in the summer sweet peppers and blackberries, too.

There are also boxes at the community garden where people can grow their own lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and whatever else they want after accessing water and tools. While they’re at it, they can ask staff members and other gardeners for advice and help.

There are community gardens like ours all over the country, organized by groups of neighbors, non-profit organizations, or even towns and cities. Community gardens are places where we can get our fingernails dirty and our bellies filled with veggies and fruit, while connecting with neighbors, celebrating the beauty of nature, and even providing food for bees and other pollinators.

Of course, people like me can’t grow all our food this way, especially in places like urban Connecticut. Still, producing some of it in such a communal way reminds us that we have the power to feed ourselves and one another. And in these dispiriting times, that should be a strong message of hope!

A (Small) World Free of Nationalism?

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine,” we sometimes sing when our Unitarian Universalist congregation meets. Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote the music more than 100 years ago, while American poet Lloyd Stone provided the words in 1934 to what became the hymn “This Is My Song.” It continues, “But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.” It’s a beautiful piece of music, poignant and full of a love of home that’s somehow radically and beautifully free of nationalism.

The sunlight beams down on used bookstores, libraries, community gardens, and even, however metaphorically, into the dark universe of Meta where there are still people who reject our click-and-buy culture, opting for mutual aid instead. “Buy Nothing!” is the thought lurking there, even if all of this can’t quite stave off the despair that circulates whenever I tune into the wider world of Supreme Court rulings and House January 6th hearings or contemplate why the heat and humidity and stupidity is rising all at once in this forlorn world of ours.

In my own small version of the world, “This Is My Song” is so beloved that my husband and I made it the entrance march at our wedding. It always reminds me that this planet is bigger and more beautiful than nationalism and militarism allow us to see. It reminds me that curiosity and connection form a web that can be stronger than border walls and xenophobia. It reminds me that the small bits of joy and hope that gardens and the gift economy give me is a seed that, with time, nurturing, and hard work, could grow into a more just and equitable future for us all.

So, that’s what I need to remind myself of with each new Supreme Court decision, each crazed statement from Donald Trump or so many other Republicans, each new Cold War moment in our embattled world. It’s good to know that there’s still something I truly do love about this country.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/america-libraries-citizen-community/
Our Floundering Public School System Is Failing Teachershttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/public-school-teachers-covid/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganApr 29, 2022

A kid spit on my husband Patrick yesterday. That sentence just keeps running through my head. The student was up on a windowsill at school and, when instructed to come down, he spit.

It’s part of Patrick’s job not to take that—the most personal of insults and an almost universal expression of disrespect—personally. He knew enough about that boy and his sad story to see the truth of the maxim “hurt people hurt.” In this case, it was also a matter of “disrespected kids disrespect.” So he handled it, and his emotional response to the grossness of being spit on, too. He got that kid down and back into class. Then he cleaned himself up and went on with his day.

This is not the first time he’s been spit on this year and it probably won’t be the last. It isn’t even the worst. Once, he was so covered in spittle he had to go home in the middle of the day to shower and change clothes. And mind you, this is all happening during the coronavirus pandemic and the mandatory mask wearing that is supposed to keep his school safe (at least from the virus).

Taking the Time

My husband’s official job title—and I’ll bet you didn’t even know such a job existed—is Wellness Interventionist. (Another school calls his position the Feelings Teacher.) He works at one of our Connecticut town’s four public elementary schools, trying to keep things from getting overheated. He attempts to intervene in conflicts between kids before they come to a head. He leads class-circle discussions about emotional health, and helps students find more complex and nuanced ways than just anger or derision to express their feelings. They are supposed to seek him out for help navigating conflicts and repairing relationships.

There’s a jargonistic term for what he does: “restorative practices and social-emotional learning.” Because he works in a bureaucracy, you won’t be surprised to know that these terms have been reduced to the acronyms RP and SEL. However fast those may be to say, though, the work itself takes time, lots and lots of time, and time is the one thing my husband seldom has in his fast-moving school days with almost 500 kids needing attention.

He’ll sit down with two kids at odds with each another and just as they get to the crux of the matter, a call comes in over his walkie talkie that a student has “eloped” (the term of art for escaping the building) and is running towards the road. He’ll be about to connect with a youngster struggling with too many grown-up-sized problems at home, when a teacher urgently calls him to a classroom to help manage a fourth grader’s water-bottle-throwing tantrum.

What choice does he have? In that case, he promised the student with the home problems that he’d continue their conversation at lunch and sprinted for the classroom. Patrick entered the room with a smile on his face. In a calm voice he said, “Okay, friends, we are going to give X some space now, so please go with your teacher to the library.” He helped her usher the boy’s fearful, dumbstruck classmates out of the room. “See you in a little bit,” he said in his most reassuring voice, before turning to that flailing, furious youngster.

With the rest of the students gone, the temper tantrum was no longer a performance and so the two of them ended up working for almost an hour cleaning up the mess. As they set tables upright, wiped up spilled water, and taped torn posters back on walls, Patrick got the kid talking about the problems that had all too literally exploded out of his small body. No, my husband couldn’t fix them, but he offered a little perspective and some tools for managing anger more constructively. He then reached out to the school’s psychiatrist and social worker, while offering support to the family.

And yes, I may not be the most objective witness, but Patrick is really good at his job—patient, friendly, and ready to help. When he needs to restrain kids intent on hurting themselves or others, he does so with a sense of moderation and equanimity right out of the “safety care” training manual.

His problem, though, is time in a school and a system that, during the pandemic, hasn’t had enough teachers or para-educators or aides—and, all too typically, is losing more of them. The school’s psychiatrist just left for a better (less dangerous) job and the principal recently announced that she’s leaving at the end of the school year. There are a dozen teachers looking for new jobs or planning on early retirement. And yes, there are other staff trained to deal with aspects of his job, but it’s hard because too many of them aren’t fully capable of dealing with the physical demands of the job. He has colleagues who are pregnant, smaller than some of the fourth graders, or older enough not to want to risk an injured back or knee from chasing or restraining kids.

A Failure for Sure—But Whose?

All too often these days, my husband comes home sad, tired, and dispirited. Unfortunately, his feelings and experiences are just one person’s tale in the sweeping epic of a failing and floundering school system. Or maybe it’s not just that system, but our whole society.

You probably won’t be surprised to know that public schools have been in perpetual crisis for a long time. Fill in the blank for the calamity of your choice: from once-upon-a-time segregated schools and federal agents escorting Black youngsters to school to today’s fights over which bathroom kids should use and who plays on what volleyball team. Schools have long been the culture war’s battlefield of choice.

Why is there public education and what is its purpose? If the original system was built and funded at public expense to prepare the next generation of factory workers, today’s system is there so that parents can work. Covid-19 revealed that sad truth. When schools shut down, so does part of the economy. These days, they also provide a whole array of social support for families badly in need, often including food, clothes, health care, and access to technology.

The pandemic shutdowns revealed failures and weaknesses in a threadbare social system, but it did allow certain strengths to shine through as well. For one thing, the commitment of so many teachers, para-educators, and support staff, often under remarkably difficult circumstances, should be considered a marvel. Our educators are the under-appreciated, underpaid, undervalued superheroes of the Covid era. They transitioned to a new medium of education, the virtual classroom, and figured out how to mobilize the sort of resources that students and their families need just to keep going. School buses delivered computers, lunches, and dinners. Teachers made themselves available after hours to walk families through the new technology of schooling, even though they often had kids of their own and elders to care for as well. And they did it all for far too long amid the Trump administration’s dismal culture wars!

They worked on an emergency, pedal-to-the-metal footing for three semesters before going back to in-person instruction in the fall of 2021, with masks, plexiglass barriers, and the constant threat of shutdowns. They started the school year stressed and tired, and now, in April 2022, they’re exhausted.

Rage or Gratitude (or Both?)

You would think all of this would make a deep impression on my own children, one in second grade and the other in fourth, who can sometimes see their father in the hallways of their school. When it comes to school, though, our two kids are in their own world—one of new books and good friends. At dinner, when we say grace, they’re forever praising their teachers. As far as they know, school is going great. I wouldn’t have it any other way, so out of their earshot Patrick and I try to talk through his hard days.

In the face of it all, I feel both inchoate rage and extravagant gratitude. The rage is easier. Patrick is dealing with many layers of trauma and tragedy all at once in the minds and bodies of five to 12-year-olds. It should surprise no one that, after 18 months of virtual “learning” and social isolation, kids are having a hard time reacclimating.

Educators don’t know everything that happened to every kid between March 2020 and September 2021, but they know enough to be sure that it was often bleak: many had family members who lost jobs or even died. Some moved into far smaller living spaces with more people or found themselves left alone for long periods of time with just the Internet and all its dark corners for company.

I was so relieved when our kids went back to school, but I wished that more time had been spent on reconnection, community rebuilding, and healing. Of course, I wasn’t in charge and had to watch helplessly as, in September 2021, they instantly went back to standardized testing.

I blame the school system for charging full steam ahead over the minds and bodies of the youngest, most vulnerable members of our community. Yet I’m grateful as well. It’s so confusing! In spite of everything, my kids are so happy to be back and I find myself surprised, impressed, and moved by what they bring home to share.

Time Is Money

Everyone has ideas about how to improve our schools and can point a finger at those they blame for the failures in that system: absent or omnipresent parents, video games and social media, cops in schools (as symbols of public safety or emblems of the “school-to-prison” pipeline), and that’s just to begin down an endless list.

Wherever you want to lay the blame, the solution isn’t hard to find, it’s just expensive.

An administrator told Patrick that the way to fix our schools would be to have each teacher and aide deal with a class of just 12 students, with plenty of time for exercise, recess, and the arts. Indeed, that would undoubtedly fix many of the problems Patrick faces daily, because so much of his work involves putting out fires long after they’ve broken out. In a class fuuof 12, a teacher would be able to give any smoldering kid attention—and some choices.

However, we already do invest a lot of money in our schools with anything but the greatest results. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States spent $14,100 per elementary and secondary student in 2017—37 percent more than the average of $10,300 paid by member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 “highly developed” wealthy nations. On that list, only Luxembourg, Austria, and Norway seem to spend more than the United States does, but the academic performance numbers of many of those countries are so much better than ours.

Why? To explore the all-too-complicated answer to that question, you would undoubtedly have to dive into this country’s brutal history of the transatlantic slave trade and racism, Calvinist notions of who deserves to succeed, and so many other factors. But given my own background, I tend to think about it in terms of Washington’s military budget—in terms, that is, of how poorly we invest staggering sums of our taxpayer dollars. After all, it’s not just how much you spend, it’s how you spend it! In our case, prodigiously on war and preparations for more of it, rather than on our children.

The United States spends so much more on its military than any other country (more than the next 11 countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and we still aren’t safer, not faintly so. When we “invest” more than $800 billion annually in the military-industrial complex, as President Joe Biden proposes to do in 2023, there are a lot of things we can’t afford that would actually make us safer. Money wasted on the military doesn’t get spent on mental health—unsurprisingly, the man who attacked that Brooklyn subway car, injuring 23 people, suffered from mental illness—and it doesn’t get spent on gun-safety measures either. According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 12,000 people have been killed by guns so far this year alone in this disastrously over-armed nation of ours. How can we even say that we’re a nation at peace, given the endless violence and mass killings that embroil us?

And guns aren’t the only thing killing us either. While we spend so much on military infrastructure, we don’t repair the rest of our infrastructure adequately. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives that civil infrastructure (roads, bridges, parks, water systems, etc.) a C-minus grade and estimates the spending needed there at $2.59 trillion. Finally, military spending hampers our ability to respond to genuine threats to safety and security like the coronavirus pandemic, which has already killed nearly a million Americans (and likely many more than that).

Education suffers, too. While the US toolbox may be full of hammers, kids aren’t nails. And while federal education spending is relatively high, it’s spent all too politically instead of going where it’s most needed. Take New London, Connecticut, where I live, for example. I looked up what we get per student per year and it was more than I thought: $16,498 (with $1,210 coming from the federal government and the rest from the state and local taxes).

Nonetheless, we’re a poor community. The median income for a household in New London is about $47,000, well below the national average, and we have a home ownership rate of less than 40 percent. So many families in our school district qualify for free or reduced lunch that they just give every kid free lunch (and breakfast and a snack, too) without any paperwork. A lot of the students in our public schools are “English Language Learners” (ELL), meaning they speak another language at home and need additional support to learn the material in math or social studies as they are also learning English. Many of them also have “Individualized Education Plans” (IEPs) indicating that, with an attention-deficit or learning disability, they need extra support and accommodation to learn. A not-so-small minority of students are ELL with IEPs. All that adds up to a lot of need and a lot of extra expense.

We should get more resources because our needs are high, but perversely enough, the needier a school district is, the fewer resources it gets, because in so many parts of the country education spending is pegged to property taxes. Chester, Connecticut, is just 20 miles away from here, but it might as well be in another world. Their schools spend $24,492 per student and have very few English-language learners in that very white small community.

In our town, until the pandemic shut down the schools, one of the elementary schools did double duty as a food pantry once a month. The food line would then snake around the building, including parents, grandparents, and people coming straight from work (among them, custodians, cooks, and teachers from that very building). No one got paid enough to turn down a free box of food toward the end of the month.

I helped out there sometimes and one thing struck me: The news media never showed up. Not a single reporter. That line of 200 or more people who needed food badly enough to spend a few hours there at the end of a workday just wasn’t a big enough deal. If doctors had lined up around the hospital in a similar fashion, or engineers and scientists employed at our local weapons manufacturer, General Dynamics, maybe that would have been news. But poor schools, poor people… nothing new there.

It’s Not Fair

With his limited resources, Patrick is part social worker, part social connector, part bouncer, part enforcer, and part small-group facilitator. An administrator who makes three times his salary saw him in action recently and said, “We should have five of you!” And she was right. That school does need more people like him. Her tone, though, was wistful, as if she were hoping for a unicorn for Christmas. Of course, having the resources to pay people who are going to help create the conditions under which children will learn in an optimal fashion shouldn’t be a fairy tale.

That kid on the windowsill probably needed more than any school could give him. He probably needed a grief counselor and a psychiatrist, a safe place to live and a good night’s sleep, glasses, shoes that fit, and a warmer jacket, too. And the one thing he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t get what he needed and it pissed him off. In that moment, I suspect school stuff was far from his mind. He undoubtedly wasn’t worrying about his math scores or his reading level. My best guess is that he wasn’t thinking about the consequences of his actions either, like being sent to the principal’s office or getting suspended. From what Patrick said afterward, it sounded like the kid was enraged, suffering, deeply sad, over-stimulated, out of options, and couldn’t believe that any adult would listen to him express his problems with words alone.

Schools can’t solve all of this society’s problems. But every day, my kids’ teachers show up and try, just as Patrick does. It’s not fair, it’s not working particularly well, but it does make a difference and that’s better than the alternative.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/public-school-teachers-covid/
This Holiday Season, Give the Gift of a Habitable Planethttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/consumerism-holidays-target/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganDec 23, 2021

Confession time: This year, I don’t want to buy my kids anything for Christmas. Big one, right? Okay, let me soften that just a bit. I have bought a few modest, useful things. But that’s it! No new games, no new toys, no new clothes (other than socks)… nothing. They already have too much. We have too much. Our nation is drowning in stuff and, in reality, need almost none of it.

There, I’ve said it! It feels good to get that off my chest, even if it makes me sound like a cold-hearted Grinch of a mother. But maybe that’s what it truly takes to be a good environmentalist these days.

On the radio recently, I heard this stumper: The US economy depends on consumers consuming and the earth depends on us not consuming. Which are we going to choose? Once the conundrum of this moment was posed that way, I knew instantly where I stood. With the earth and against consumption! I raised my fist in support, even as I maneuvered my empty seven-person, gas-fed minivan down the highway. I mention that lest you jump to the conclusion that I’m a 100 percent eco-soul, which, of course, none of us can be in this strange world of ours. (On that, more to come.)

And therein lies the rub! We can always be doing better. I compost and recycle and don’t shower every day. Our thermostat is set at 63 and most of the winter I wear a hat and scarf inside. All this feels conscientious and hardscrabble, but does it change anything? Does what I do matter at all?

To put myself in context, I keep thinking of a 2019 report that found the US military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e [carbon-dioxide equivalent] than most countries.” In fact, the British researchers who did that study discovered that if the United States military were a nation-state it would be the “47th largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world (just taking into account fuel usage emissions).”

If our military machine is such a major polluter (and TomDispatch readers would have known that back in 2007, thanks to Michael Klare’s reporting), my contributions to a greener tomorrow through low-key body odor might not make the slightest difference. In short, I’m not showering as much and I’m giving myself a hard time for driving my old minivan around, while Brown University’s Cost of Wars Project finds that the US military has been giving the planet a truly hard time. In its Global War on Terror alone, it released 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 2001 and 2017, effectively pumping more than twice as many planet-destroying dirty gases into the atmosphere as all the cars in the United States in the same period.

Target Mania

You might reasonably ask: What does this have to do with Christmas, or rather the annual holidays celebrated by Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who mark the darkest period of the year with festivals of lights, feasts, and gift-giving? I guess this time of year makes me, at least, want to interrogate my inner Grinch. If the military is such a staggering polluter, bigger even than Black Friday deal-hunters and Cyber Monday bargain-shoppers, why am I so worried about overdoing it this holiday season?

OK, here’s how my thinking goes, more or less: Just because damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead buying as if there were no tomorrow starts at the top with the Pentagon’s way of making war on this planet doesn’t mean it has to go all the way down to me. I mean, I want there to be a tomorrow and a next day and a day after that. I don’t want my children to be driven from their future homes thanks to climate-change-induced rising waters, already cluttered with micro-plastic, single-use coffee cups and lost flip-flops.

American consumption is a problem. The carbon footprint of, and the garbage from, every purchase can be calculated and increasingly will be labeled. As Annaliese Griffin noted recently in a New York Times op-ed:

Every new purchase puts into motion a global chain of events, usually beginning with extracting oil to make the plastic that is in everything from stretchy jeans to the packaging they come in. Those materials travel from processing plant to factory to container ship, to eventually land on my front porch, and then become mine for a time. Sooner or later, they will most likely end up in a landfill.

We have to be more than consumers. We are potentially part of the path out of the morass, out of being a nation that says, “I buy, therefore I am,” instead of “I think, therefore I am.” Collectively, we already have so much stuff that decluttering is a multimillion-dollar industry and self-storage a multibillion-dollar one.

We have eight years to halve carbon emissions before our species irrevocably alters the planet’s climate, according to the latest report from the UN Environment Programme. Getting there is going to involve beginning to dismantle the military-industrial complex, banishing more fossil-fuel-driven cars from the roads and planes from the air, and reining in consumerism in a major way. In short, it will take a reordering of how we—and that includes me—do everything.

And yet, even knowing all this, even having sworn all this, I find myself at Target on a Monday three weeks before Christmas. I’m there with a strange shopping list that ping-pongs from bras to celery and milk to kids’ toothpaste to a screwdriver set small enough to open our thermostat. And I have just one hour. “Target will have it all,” I tell myself. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? They have everything on my shopping list, as well as holiday garlands and sugar cookies and swimsuits and cute toilet brushes. (Why do toilet brushes need to be cute?)

It all demands my attention. I grip my shopping list, grit my teeth, and try to stay the course. And then I remember the birthday party the kids are invited to this weekend at a bowling alley. I usually have them make cards and give books as gifts, but I’m not going to be there with them to navigate the gift-giving portion of the afternoon, so I feel compelled to buy a “real” present.

That’s how I end up in the Lego aisle where the shelves are almost empty. I stand there for 20 minutes talking myself in and out of buying one of three choices. Finally, I get all three, telling myself that they’re on sale and we can give the other two away as gifts. And so it goes in this country’s version of consumer heaven (or hell).

In the parking lot afterwards, I feel awful, thinking about the carbon footprint of those Lego sets and their long journeys from factories in Brazil and China. I try to perk myself up by remembering how that Danish company is trying to get rid of its plastic packaging and investing in recyclable materials.

At home, I tuck the Lego sets away and wonder: What will my kids be missing out on if I’m truly able to keep this Christmas low-key and experience-focused? I go online to find out, and my idle research turns up an astounding array of loud, robotic, expensive plastic objects with strange names. The Purrble is a stuffed animal with an electronic heartbeat that, when you pet it, purrs and “calms down.” It sells for $50, and if that isn’t expensive enough for you, there’s always Moji. For $100, that interactive Labradoodle toy does tricks on command and responds when you pet it like a real dog but won’t chew up your shoes or have an accident on the carpet.

Moji and Purrble are likely to be top sellers in this holiday season, but it looks like most people who want them under the tree have already got them because they’re now scarce indeed. Still, I kept clicking away. The last toy I see in the “hot toys for 2021 list,” however, doesn’t make me purr or do tricks. Instead, it summons up all my bad feelings about people who make and market toys—and gives me a sense of validation for my simple Christmas plans.

It’s the “5 Surprise Mini Brands Mystery Capsule Real Miniature Brands Collectible Toy.” Say that three times fast. On second thought, don’t. The plastic capsules are wrapped in plastic and contain small plastic objects, each behind its own plastic window. It’s plastic, plastic, plastic all the way to the end of the line. When your children unwrap them on Christmas morning, they’ll find five tiny replicas of brand-name supermarket items like ketchup bottles or peanut-butter jars in each of them. As the ad copy explains about these ads you’ve given your kid: “Create your mini shopping world: Collect them all and tick off your collector’s guide shopping list as you go!”

Oh, for the love of mistletoe, really? Yes! The Toy Guy, Chris Byrne, claims that it’s a popular toy because “kids love miniature things and they love shopping.” For the privilege of entrenching brand loyalty in your small children and making grocery shopping with your offspring even harder than it already is, you pay $15 plus shipping for two of them and the 10 tiny objects they contain.

Sadly enough, I know that my kids would love them. Considering their carbon footprints and the psychology and marketing behind them, I despair.

How to Fly Through the Air on the Highest Trapeze (All on Your Own)

It isn’t all doom and gloom, though. It can’t be. My daughter recently reminded me that kids can play with anything—even garbage—for hours on end if you let them. Madeline, who is 7, was sent home from school for 10 days after close contact with a kid who was Covid-positive. I decided to skip the assignments her well-meaning teacher e-mailed me and hid the tablet she sent home in Madeline’s backpack. I was not going to survive those days if I had to sit next to her, monitor progress on worksheets, and make sure she wasn’t toggling over to YouTube to watch doll-transformation videos.

Without the school schedule and the attendant fights over screens, time passed quickly; we went to Covid-test appointments, took long walks, spent time with my mom working on puzzles and doing watercolors, and engaged in house-cleaning projects room by room. In between all of that, I left her to her own devices: unplugged, unscripted, and unsupervised.

One day, while I was typing at the dining-room table, she found some old foam dolls she had made at a craft fair. I had pulled them out from under the couch with all the dust bunnies and put them in a box to take to the trash.

“No, no, mom!” she exclaimed. “These girls are my favorites. I made them. They’re not trash. I’m playing with them right now.”

“All right,” I replied. “Let’s see you do so.”

She spent the next three and a half hours in an elaborate circus landscape of her own creation. She tied strings between lamps and bookshelves, moved chairs around, magic-markered faces and costumes onto the dolls, and then put them through trapeze routines on those strings. As I e-mailed, while checking off items on my to-do list and adding new ones, she chirped away, putting dialogue, feeling, and action in the mouths of these small pieces of airy plastic. Every once in a while, she’d march through the dining room heading for the kitchen art shelf to get more markers, wire, or paper.

Finally, she invited me into the living room, asked me to find circus music on my phone, and presented me with the show. I stood marveling at the extraordinary mess she’d made and calculating how long it would take to clean up as she flipped, swung, and danced her characters through the air with the greatest of ease on their flying trapezes. I clapped, smiled, and went back to my to-do list, suggesting that it might be time to clean up.

“I’m not done, mom!” she insisted. “I have another hour or so of work to do with them.” And as it turned out, she did. I put my own mess away, started dinner, and then helped her sweep up the last of the project just as everyone else was getting home from work and school.

What struck me, of course, was that it cost nothing. Her play was engrossing, dynamic, self-directed, and creative and it didn’t come from across the sea in a shipping container, but from inside her.

Mind you, I’m neither a monster nor a Grinch. There will be presents. The kids will be getting umbrellas for Christmas, as well as new socks and used books from those series that they so adore. They’ll get diaries that lock with tiny keys and new pens in their stockings. They’ll help us make cookies and candies to box up for friends and families as gifts.

We’ll celebrate and connect and share, but it won’t be a branded frenzy of consumption at our house. We don’t need it, not in a world that’s threatening to come down around our ears.

We have eight years to crawl back from the brink of total climate disaster. And we’ll do what we can and try to enjoy every minute of it.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/consumerism-holidays-target/
Living in the Shadow of Human Exterminationhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/living-in-the-shadow-of-human-extermination/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganJun 25, 2021

Groton and New London, Conn. are home to about 65,000 people, three colleges, the Coast Guard Academy, 15 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines capable of destroying the world many times over, and General Dynamics’ Electric Boat, a multibillion-dollar private corporation that offers stock options to its shareholders and mega-salaries to its top executives as it pockets taxpayer dollars and manufactures yet more of those stealthy, potentially world-ending machines. Whew! That was a long sentence!

Naval Submarine Base New London stretches along the east side of the Thames River, straddling the towns of Groton and Ledyard. Occupying at least 680 acres, the base has more than 160 major facilities. The 15 subs based there are the largest contingent in the nation. They’re manufactured just down the river at Electric Boat/General Dynamics, which once built the Polaris and Trident nuclear submarines, employs more than 12,000 people in our region, and is planning to hire another 2,400 this year to meet a striking “demand” for the newest version of such subs.

Some readers might already be asking themselves: Are submarines still a thing? Do we really still put men (and women) far beneath the ocean’s surface in a giant metal tube, ready to launch a nuclear first strike at a moment’s notice? At a time when the greatest threats to human life may be viruses hidden in our own exhales, our infrastructure is crumbling, and so much else is going wrong, are we really spending billions of dollars on submarines?

Yes!

Back in 2010, the Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review called for a “recapitalization of the nation’s sea-based deterrent,” as though we hadn’t been spending anything on submarines previously. To meet that goal, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and now the Biden administration all agreed that, on a planet already filled with devastating nuclear weapons, the United States must begin construction of a new class of 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines.

The Navy’s 2021 budget submission estimates that the total procurement cost for that 12-ship class of subs will be $109.8 billion. However, even a number that big might prove nothing but rough back-of-the-napkin figuring. After all, according to the Navy’s 2022 request, the cost estimate for the first submarine of the 12 they plan to build, the lead ship in its new program, had already grown from $14.39 billion to $15.03 billion. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but string out all those zeros behind it and you’ll realize that the difference is more than $640 million, just a little less than what Baltimore—a city of more than 600,000 people—will get in federal pandemic relief aid.

Swirling around those submarines are descriptions citing “strategy” and “capability.” But don’t be fooled: they’ll be potential world killers. Each of those 12 new subs will be armed with 16 Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs, which have a range of 4,500 miles and can carry 14 W-76-1 thermonuclear warheads. Each one of those warheads is six times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the US military detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Start multiplying 12 times 16 times 14 times 6 and there isn’t enough world to destroy with math like that. After all, the single Hiroshima bomb, “small” as it was, killed an estimated 140,000 people and turned the city into rubble and ash.

The best way to understand the Columbia-class submarine, then, is as a $100 billion-plus initiative that aims to deliver 16,128 Hiroshimas.

Capital of the World

My family and I live in New London and evidence of the military is everywhere here. There’s a cannon planted amid the roses at the entrance to the motel right off the highway near our house. And another in front of the laundromat. Huge American flags flap at the car dealership that offers special financing to Navy personnel.

Signs declaring New London/Groton to be the “Submarine Capital of the World” festoon the highways into town. The huge naval submarine base and the General Dynamics/Electric Boat yards dominate the Groton side of the Thames River. There’s a massive garage for half-built submarines, painted a very seventies shade of green, that chews up most of the scenery on the Groton side of the river, alongside cranes and docks and industrial buildings in various hues of grey. It’s dismal. New London’s waterfront homes and private beaches look out on three generations of military-industrial-complex architecture. We wouldn’t want to live in Groton, but at least they feast their eyes on our quaint downtown and the parks that stretch along our side of the river.

On the New London side, General Dynamics/Electric Boat looks more like a corporate campus than a shipyard. It employs a lot of people, but there are still plenty of New Londoners who work at jobs that have nothing to do with the military or the business of building and designing submarines. Unfortunately, that seems to be changing, because General Dynamics is ramping up its engineering and manufacturing operations in order to build that new fleet of submarines.

Local developers smell money in the air, which means that our downtown is getting a makeover intended to attract the sort of young professionals who will design and oversee the production of those subs. A new development right near New London’s General Dynamics complex is now renting studio apartments for $1,300 a month, even though ours is the fifth poorest city in Connecticut.

Bonus? Killer Kitsch

An uproar of protest over our rampant version of local militarism rose to a sustained din in the 1970s and 1980s but has since dulled to a whisper, despite regular protest vigils and demonstrations carried out by a stalwart handful of people. It’s tough to understand since the danger is still so imminent. After all, the symbolic Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists now stands at 100 seconds to nuclear midnight, as close as it’s ever been in its 70 years of existence. Meanwhile, the United States will once again spend staggering sums on its military in fiscal year 2022.

The upside? Our local thrift stops are full of the strange kitsch that comes with military occupation. I drink my morning coffee out of a white mug that commemorates Electric Boat’s 1987 Christmas Blood Drive, emblazoned with a red drop of blood, the company’s logo, and the phrase “I give so that others may live.”

I’m a lifelong pacifist, the child of people who, as protesters, climbed over fences and cut through locks in order to enter US weapons facilities like that naval base at Groton. I spent my childhood at the Pentagon, where, a few times a year, my parents and our friends made elaborate spectacles out of blood and ash and cardboard tombstones, leaving Pentagon workers to walk through the muck and mess, tracking it into the headquarters of the Department of Defense. And yet I’ll confess to you, in the privacy of TomDispatch, that I do have a genuine weakness for military kitsch.

My husband is a lifelong pacifist, too. His parents went to malls to hold “Stop War Toys” demonstrations and entered toy stores to put “this glorifies violence” stickers on G.I. Joe and Rambo dolls. He spent his summers outside Electric Boat in Groton. His family and their friends went to the commissionings and christenings of newly built subs, holding protest signs, blocking the entrances, and trying to leaflet the well-dressed guests coming to those strange ceremonies with oddly Christian baptismal overtones to them. And yet (or do I mean, and so?) he loves military kitsch, too. As a result, whenever we go to our local Goodwill, Salvation Army store, or neighborhood yard sales, we invariably keep a lookout for mugs and beer glasses from our corner of the military-industrial complex.

It’s the ultimate in-joke for us. Such killer kitsch helps us manage our deep discomfort with living in a militarized community.

One made-in-China coffee mug of relatively recent vintage that we own, for instance, has a picture on one side of a submarine and the phrase “Virginia Class: Confronting the Challenge, Driving Out Cost.” The other reads: “Designed for Affordability: General Dynamics, Electric Boat.”

That second mug always makes me snicker because the Virginia Class submarines were built by Electric Boat in New London/Groton in collaboration with Newport News Shipbuilding, part of Huntington Ingalls in Virginia.

Those boats cost a mere $3.45 billion each and that “two-yard strategy”—Connecticut and Virginia—was meant to keep both of those corporate entities from financial disaster. (“Afloat” is the word that comes to mind.) However, it made for an even more expensive product as partially assembled submarines had to be floated laboriously up and down the Eastern seaboard. According to Ronald O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service, “A primary aim of the arrangement was to minimize the cost of building Virginia-class boats at a relatively low annual rate in two shipyards (rather than entirely in a single shipyard) while preserving key submarine-construction skills at both shipyards.” Not likely, as it turned out. Then again, what weapons-building project doesn’t have staggering cost overruns in 21st-century America?

Honestly, can you imagine the federal government contracting with Hershey and Nestle to collaborate on a gigantic new candy bar and then paying extra for it because their workers needed to pass the product back and forth between their factories, hundreds of miles apart? Such thoughts regularly occur to me as I drink my morning coffee out of that hilariously labelled “Designed for Affordability” mug. The anger that follows is like a second jolt of caffeine!

Happy Hour?

Speaking of rage, we drink our happy-hour beers out of glasses commemorating the USS Pittsburgh, SSN 720. That Los Angeles class submarine was commissioned in 1985 and was one of two that launched Tomahawk Cruise missiles at Iraq during 1991’s Gulf War.

The beer glasses make me think of the dingy strip of bars right outside the main gate of the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton. They’re all closed now, but in the 1970s heyday of submarine manufacturing, bars like El Bolero (shortened to The Elbow) and Elfie’s served the shipyard workers and submariners alike. The lunch crowd was thick, the bar full of small glasses of beer, and the workers would drop dollar bills in garbage cans as they filed out and back across the street to work. Those bars estimated then that they made more in their daily lunchtime dollar-bill rushes than other local bars and restaurants made in a week.

At some point, the higher-ups at Electric Boat grew embarrassed by the daily spectacle of drunken workers, beer bottles littering the curbs, regular fender-benders, and the fights that tend to accompany excessive drinking. Their solution? They stopped letting the workers leave for lunch.

As a younger person, I imagined that daytime drinking served to dull the cognitive dissonance of working people who put food on the table for their children by welding the machines that threatened all children anywhere on this planet. As I grow older, however, I wonder if such daytime drinking wasn’t just fun.

The Small No

Another way we manage our discomfort with our local version of the military-industrial complex and what it means for this country and this planet is to be a small but visible “No” amid the ubiquity of militarism in this town, amid all those chubby, cute submarines that adorn our public spaces.

We stand on a bleak street corner near the base for at least an hour once a week to protest the world we find ourselves in. It’s admittedly a small thing, but we do it without fail. Souped-up trucks and fast cars with custom paint jobs rev their engines as they pass, cutting that corner uncomfortably close, while tossing gravel in their wake. The vehicles are mostly driven by clean-cut young men, often in the uniform of the Groton/New London Naval Submarine base. They’re off for an hour of freedom at the newly completed, squeaky-clean Chipotle up the hill or the seedy Mynx Cabaret across the street. If we have staying power, we’ll see the Chipotle crew come tearing back down the hill at the end of that hour.

On one corner is a grimy little liquor store with a big parking lot, the kind of place that should make you question your drinking habits. (If I don’t have a problem, why am I parked here?) On the second corner is an empty lot with the vestiges of a once-thriving car-repair shop. The third has a truck rental company, the signpost of a transitory community. And sure enough, the license plates on the cars streaming into the base hail from Navy-centered communities like ours around the country.

Route 12 is a mini-highway where cars regularly hit 70 miles an hour as they roar up the hill. We’re desperately small and slow by comparison. My mother paces the sidewalk, I stand still, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, while our friend Cal Robertson sits. A Vietnam Veteran, he came back from that long-gone war physically unscathed but deeply disturbed by everything he witnessed and experienced.

Cal holds a sign emblazoned with this question: “What About the Children?” Some cars honk in response. My guess: not so much in support of his message as in recognition of his regular presence over these long decades. My mother and I are interlopers, occasional sign holders counting down the minutes, but Cal—comfortable in a walker than converts to a chair—could do this all day.

My mother holds a simple sign that reads “No Nukes.” For the men in trucks headed out to lunch, I painted on mine: “Meatball Subs, not Nuclear Submarines.” It receives an occasional nod or grin. And in the meantime, in our very community, the place where I’m raising my kids, the military-industrial complex continues to invest in and build vessels meant only for the end of the world.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/living-in-the-shadow-of-human-extermination/
How to Cope With Daily Life During a Pandemichttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-coronavirus-election/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganOct 7, 2020

After all these months and 210,000 deaths, you’d think I’d be used to it all, but I’m not. It doesn’t seem even a little normal yet. I’m still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties. I miss browsing the stacks at the library and the racks at the thrift shop. I miss going to our Unitarian Universalist congregation and the robust community connection we enjoyed every Sunday.

I should count myself lucky, of course, that such human encounters and quotidian pleasures are all that I miss. I have yet to lose friends or family to Covid-19, I haven’t lost my job, and our home is not in danger of foreclosure. Still, I’m at a loss to figure out how to go on.

But that’s the work, isn’t it? Going on somehow because, if the experts are on target—and they’re hard to hear above the din of the bombast and threats of carnage coming out of Washington—they say that things won’t get back to normal for a year or longer. They say this is the new normal: masks, distance, existential dread over every sore throat.

Another year… at least. How do I pace myself and my family for the long haul of the pandemic? How do we figure out how to mitigate our risks and still live lives of some sort? Who do we trust? Who do we listen to? And who do we call if a spiking fall or winter pandemic hits us directly?

I’m full of missing and longing, but the thing I miss most poignantly and sharply isn’t something (or someone) you could see or touch. What I miss is the privileged (and ultimately false) notion, almost an article of faith for white, middle-class people like me, that the future is predictable, that there is a “normal.” I miss good old-fashioned American optimism, that “aw shucks” sentiment that absolves and salves and says with a twang or lilt: It’ll be okay. They’ll figure it out. Things will get back to normal. This is only temporary.

Pandemic Plus

While most of the developed world has been dealing with the impact of the pandemic in a reasonable fashion—caring for the sick, burying the dead, enforcing lockdowns and the sort of distancing and masking that seems so necessary—it’s played out differently here in the good old US of A. Here, we have a pandemic-plus—plus a broken social safety net, a for-profit health care system, a war of disinformation, and that’s just to start down a list of add-on disasters.

In addition, parts of the United States have been beset by record wildfires, hurricanes, and deadly storms. So add on the impact of catastrophic climate change.

Here in the land of the fearful and the home of the riven, it’s been a pandemic plus poverty, plus staggering economic inequality, plus police violence, plus protest, plus white supremacy. It’s a nightmare, in other words, and, despite those more than 210,000 dead Americans, it’s not slowing down. And no matter the facts on the ground, and the bodies below the ground, the president’s supporters regularly deny there’s the slightest need for masks, social distancing, shutdowns, or much of anything else. So, it’s a pandemic plus lunacy, too—a politically manipulated lunacy spiced with violence and the threat of violence heading into an increasingly fraught election, which could even mean a pandemic plus autocracy or a chaotic American version of fascism. In other words, it’s a lot.

Still, it’s also the fall and, after this endless summer, my three kids have started school again—sort of. They are in first, third, and eighth grade. Right now, there’s more coaching around masks and distancing than instruction in math and the ABCs. Still, the teachers are working hard to make this happen and my kids are so happy to be away from us that they don’t even seem to mind those masks, or the shields around their desks, or the regimented way lunch and recess have to happen. Over the whole experiment, of course, hangs an unnerving reality (or do I mean unreality?): that in-person schooling could dissolve in an errant cough, a spiking fever, and a few microscopic germs catapulting through the air. In fact, that’s already been happening in other areas of Connecticut where I live.

After all these months of lockdown, my husband and I automatically wear masks everywhere, arranging the odd outdoor gathering of a handful of friends and trying to imagine how any of this will work in winter, no less long-term. Still, bit by bit, we’re doing our best to quilt together an understanding of how to live in the midst of such a pandemic—and that’s important because it’s so obvious that there’s going to be no quick fix in the chaotic new world we’ve been plunged into.

Seven months in, I’m finally realizing what so many marginalized people have always known: We’re on our own. It came to me like a klaxon call, a scream from the depths of my own body, all at once. I still whisper it, with sorrow and wonder: We are on our own.

It’s as if our small city of New London and the state of Connecticut had been untethered from the federal government and, despite the crazy game of telephone that passes for federal public health policy, are faring better than most because of a mixture of our state’s reputation as the “Land of Steady Habits,” our small-city web of mutual aid, and our own family’s blend of abundance and austerity. Still, the fact that, relatively speaking, we’re doing OK doesn’t make the realization that we’re on our own any less stark or troubling.

It’s not complicated, really. You can’t beat a pandemic with a mixture of personal responsibility and family creativity. Science, policy, and a national plan are what’s needed. My own vision for such a plan in response to Covid-19 would be the passage of a universal basic income, robust worker protections, and Medicare for All. But that’s just me… well, actually, it’s probably the secret dream of the majority of Americans, and it’s certainly the opposite of the position of Trump and his ilk. It says that we really all are in this together and we better start acting like it. We need to take care of one another to survive.

In spite of it all, I’m doing my best to manage this new normal by focusing on what I actually can do. At least I can feed people.

Our city was poor even before the state ordered a lockdown in mid-March and few had the extra money to panic-buy. So the food justice organization I work for started planting extra carrots, peas, and collards back in March. We built public garden boxes and painted signs telling people to harvest for free. We distributed soil and seeds to people all over the city and gave them some gardening 101 guidance.

And now, as October begins, we’re still finishing harvesting all that food and distributing it every week. On Fridays, I also help pack boxes of milk and eggs, meat and vegetables, which we then deliver to more than 100 families. The rhythm involved in harvesting the produce and packing the boxes, each an immersive physical task, helps banish my darker thoughts, at least for a while.

“We Are Going to Be in Very Good Shape”

The president held a news conference on March 30. Of course, that’s ancient history now, separated as it is from the present by long months of deaths and hospitalizations, layoffs and political infighting. The CEOs of Honeywell, Jockey, MyPillow, United Technologies, and other companies were gathered alongside administration officials that day. It should have been a briefing on where we Americans were a month into what was clearly going to be a long slog. Above all, it should have honored those who had already died. Instead—no surprise looking back from our present nightmarish vantage point—it proved to be an extended advertisement for those companies and a chance for their CEOs to spout patriotic pablum and trade compliments with the commander in chief.

I was crying a lot then. When the president said, “We have to get our country back to where it was and maybe beyond,” I began to sob and dry heave. After I finally wiped away the tears and blew my nose, I checked out the website of a company that makes homeopathic remedies. A friend had sent me a list of ones doctors were supposedly using to treat coronavirus symptoms in Germany, Italy, and China.

“Get these if you can,” she texted. It wasn’t science. I admit it. It was desperation. As one of millions of Americans on state insurance with no primary-care doctor or bespoke concierge service, I feared the worst.

As the CEO from MyPillow was telling the American people to use the time of the shutdown to “get back in the Word, read our Bibles,” I made my own faith gesture and pressed the buy button. When the order arrived, it was full of tiny, archaic vials labeled with names like Belladonna and Drosera. Even now, when I feel anxious and cloudy, I rummage through that box of vials and read the names like incantations. Better that than heeding the president’s assertion on that long-gone day that “we are going to be in very good shape.”

A Handful of Chickens

We are not in very good shape and it’s getting worse every day. As the November election looms and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death (as well as the grim Republican response to it) casts an ever more massive shadow over the country, the subtext of the administration’s message—however convoluted its delivery—is simple enough: You’re on your own. Over the last half-year, whether discussing the pandemic or the vote to come, Donald Trump has made one bizarre, bombastic, patently untrue assertion after another. In the process, he’s vacillated between a caricature of a dictator from some long-lost Isabel Allende novel and of an insecure middle manager (The Office’s Michael Scott on steroids).

Critical medical information, public health guidelines, and the disbursement of necessary protective equipment have all been thoroughly messed up and politicized in ways that are harmful today and could be devastating for years to come. As Peter Baker of The New York Times reported in September, so many of us are indeed confused: “With Mr. Trump saying one thing and his health advisors saying another, many Americans have been left to figure out on their own whom to believe, with past polls sharing that they have more faith in the experts than their president.”

That’s me! I do have faith in the experts. I’m wearing a mask and digging into the idea that mask wearing is going to be a part of our lives for at least the next year or so. In other words, the new normal will be ever more of the same, which means careful, awkward, tentative engagement with a wildly unpredictable world full of pathogens and unmasked “patriots.” The new normal will mean trading in the old sock masks my mother-in-law fashioned for us and investing in more high-tech and effective masks. Beyond that, my answer to all this couldn’t be more feeble. It’s taking care of my backyard chickens and my front-yard garden and adding strands to our small web of mutual aid.

This spring and summer, I dug up more of my lawn to plant carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash in an ever larger garden, while learning how to store rainwater from the gutters of our roof in big barrels. I joked with my friends about growing rice—and might even try it next year. I acquired a chicken coop, built a rudimentary run, and ordered six beautiful chickens from a farm in a quiet corner of Connecticut: two Golden Copper Marans, two Black Marans, and two Easter Eggers. The kids named them after characters in the Harry Potter series, which they’ve all but memorized during the shutdown. One chicken ran away and one died, but I love everything about taking care of them and harvesting the perfect magical protein orbs they produce with religious regularity.

These things bring me pleasure and a feeling of accomplishment, while leaving me with a set of tasks that I have to complete even when I feel despondent and overwhelmed. That’s all to the good, but a handful of chickens and a few collard plants don’t add up to self-sufficiency. They are not a bulwark against national insanity and ineptitude. They will not solve the problem of Donald Trump and Company.

Still, in bad, bad times, at least they keep me going and let’s face it, all of us—at least those of us who survive Covid-19—are in it for the long haul.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-coronavirus-election/
What if We All Ran For Local Office?https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/aoc-local-elections-tom-dispatch/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganJan 29, 2020
A writer reflects on her mayoral run in a Connecticut town fighting climate change and big weapons manufacturing.
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ES!” he yelled, thrusting his fist in the air. “We get to live in the mayor’s house!” My son’s reaction when I told his two sisters and him that I was running for mayor of our town became the laugh line of my campaign. But in real time, I had to burst his bubble. “Oh Seamus,” I said, smiling, “the mayor just lives in his own house. There is no ‘mayor’s house.’ If we win, we’ll keep living in our house and it will become the mayor’s house.”

Seamus’ reaction was indicative of his boundless confidence in his mother and his seven-year-old’s ignorance of how the world actually works. But I held his reaction close when I was feeling less than sure of myself, when I was headed to my third campaign event of any day as the Green Party candidate and found myself eating popcorn for dinner at 9:30 at night, listening to my kids breathe in their sleep instead of reading them bedtime stories.

I’ll cut to the chase: I lost. I am not the mayor of New London, Connecticut.

On Tuesday, November 7th, when the polls opened at six in the morning, it was cold and clear. It rained hard through the middle of the day. When those polls closed at eight that night, it was warmer and humid, but no longer raining. I was outside all day, rain or (not quite) shine, moving between the three polling stations with my friends and our signs and our cards that explained how to “Write In Frida for Mayor.”

That’s right: I wasn’t just running as a third-party candidate in a Democratic town, but as one not even on the ballot. The state had lost my paperwork. The Green Party hired a lawyer and sued, but the judge ruled against us and declined to order the secretary of state to put my name on the ballot. That setback made an uphill campaign into an Everest. I embraced the climb. Being a pacifist and an activist means that lost causes are par for the course for me and, as a Catholic, I believe hard work is its own reward.

The campaign season started in earnest (for me, anyway) after Labor Day, as I tried to balance work, family, and this new experience: this job-and-a-half running for mayor. Oh, yeah, and there was my mother, the peace activist Elizabeth McAlister. She was then in pre-trial detention for a Plowshares action at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in coastal Georgia.

Throughout the campaign, I asked New Londoners the same questions over and over: What do you love about New London? What frustrates you about our town? What’s the one concrete change that would improve your life? The answers were varied and often inspiring.

Unexpectedly, I found myself back in school in a crash course, discovering what’s wonderful (and not so wonderful) about my chosen hometown in the age of climate change and Donald Trump! I even learned a few things along the way. What follows is just a partial list.

Celebrity Matters, Even Though It Shouldn’t

While I was in Georgia for one of my mom’s hearings, I spent time with the actor and peace activist Martin Sheen. Standing near the church where supporters of my mom were ladling out dinner, we shot a low-tech political ad. It promptly went low-key viral and signaled to the pols in New London that something different might be happening. I know Martin Sheen is famous and I love him as an actor and a person, but I wasn’t prepared for how excited people would be about a 45-second clip of the two of us. As far as I can tell, it didn’t get more people to vote for me, but boy, was it a conversation starter!

Cultivate a Constituency

The political scene in New London is more than well established. It’s written in concrete: Go Democrat or go home! In our town of 27,000, set along the confluence of the Thames River and Long Island Sound, only about 16,000 of us are registered to vote, and only 3,000 to 4,000 of us turn out for off-year local elections. Before this election, there were about 70 Greens. Our party’s strategy was to bring out new voters, a great thought, but I had no idea how hard that would prove to be.

I felt strongly that environmental and climate change issues should be reframed as relevant to the poor and working-class of New London. So when, for instance, I talked about creating a more walkable city, I was careful to emphasize not just that such a goal would be an environmental plus, but that it would aid the working poor, too. After all, they walk out of necessity, so safer sidewalks and a city infrastructure that takes walkers into account—including people in wheelchairs or with limited sight and hearing—would be a good investment for all.

The same was true when it came to planting more trees. A stronger urban canopy wouldn’t just make our local world look better or absorb more carbon dioxide, it would also slow street traffic and make life easier for otherwise unwilling pedestrians.

I had hoped we would increase the local Green Party membership from 70 to 100, which didn’t happen, but we did add a handful of new members and reengaged some older ones. Call it the most modest of successes.

Be Nice and Make Your Points

We ran an issue-focused campaign. I’m going to live in New London for a long time and so are my opponents. I generally avoided taking potshots at them, cultivating instead what I thought of as a spirit of gentle disruption. Here’s an example: most of the town government department heads the current mayor hired live outside New London (something that goes against the city’s charter). The incumbent claimed he did so “to get the best,” which sounded as if he felt there was no one in town good enough to run our departments.

At debates and forums, I pushed back hard on that issue, insisting that I would hire locally, not just because the charter says we should, but because not doing so sends a message to our kids that we aren’t good enough. Such hiring practices also weaken our tax base, since some of the highest-paying jobs in our community go to people who don’t even pay property taxes here. It took time to learn how to be critical without being cranky and offer creative solutions to decades of shortsighted, reactive decision-making by a relatively unaccountable leadership.

I also wanted to demonstrate that someone who wasn’t a middle-aged white man could make a splash by running for mayor in our town. At 45, I’m no longer a young person. I even have a head full of white hair. But my two opponents were 20 years older, had grown up just blocks apart in the same New London neighborhood, and went to high school together. Long time friends and rivals, they could argue over who said what at a City Council meeting a decade ago (and they did).

They took shots at each other over a past they shared. In one debate, the Republican even condemned the Democrat for driving a Tahoe while he drove a Prius. Never mind that the Tahoe was the official city-owned mayor’s car. “I walked here,” I said, “and I’m driving home with the three members of my family in a 2002 Honda Odyssey. We’re happy to give you a ride to further decrease our carbon footprint.” Everyone laughed, and no one took us up on the offer.

Do What You Can

In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore out her shoes as she campaigned to be the youngest member of the House of Representatives. She even tweeted photos of the bottoms of those shoes with the line, “I knocked on doors until the rainwater came through my soles. Respect the hustle.”

I didn’t wear out my shoes, but I do respect the hustle, AOC, I do! Still, I did what I could. When invited to run by the local chapter of the Green Party, I said I would do so to promote issues and amplify voices that weren’t getting a reasonable hearing, but that I couldn’t run a 24/7 campaign, not with a job and young kids to take care of. I held as fast as I could to that commitment, but thinking back on the—by a conservative count—14 public meetings, eight house parties, four television appearances (three of them hour-long), three public debates with the other mayoral candidates, and daily check-ins with my campaign manager, party chair, and fellow Green Party candidates, I still feel exhausted.

What I can’t document is just what it meant to continually make myself visible in my community and connect with my neighbors. That, without a doubt, was the most rewarding and beautiful part of the experience. Handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, I ended up chatting with four high school football players who remembered my visit to their school earlier that week and told me their moms were voting for me. I was so happy, I dumped the rest of our candy in their bags.

I was walking to work one morning, balancing a birthday cake in one hand and trying to text with the other, when a garbage truck pulled up next to me and the driver called out, “I hope you win! Nobody cares about sanitation!” We chatted for a few minutes as I assured him that I knew the funds for his department had been cut in recent years and that the Green Party platform supported more money for public works, while emphasizing recycling and composting. He cheered, toot-tooted his horn, and we both continued with our day.

And by the way, no one told me how much fun it would be to knock on doors and chat with strangers, each conversation offering me a yet more complex map of my community.

Peace Begins at Home

I’m glad I threw my hat in the political ring in 2019. The whole process felt like a personal balm in a national political landscape that was pitted, mired, and aflame. My stump speech—yes, I had one!—began with these lines: “At a time when the national news is almost uniformly, massively bad, the New London Green Party is collecting, conveying, and amplifying your good ideas, hopes, and visions for our small and dynamic, diverse and youthful, historic and struggling city!”

And, honestly, we did just that.

I can look at the dates of each of the debates and recall that, while we were talking about immigration, the climate crisis and economic development, representation and equity, and how systemic racism plays out in local power struggles, the nation as a whole was mired in a kind of political hell.

Our first debate was held in an elementary school gym. I was nervous, overprepared, and my microphone gave me trouble. My kids were playing in the hallway, while more than 150 people crowded the auditorium. I answered one question in Spanish, said I would reject the $124,000 mayoral salary because one-third of the people in our community were living below the poverty line, and insisted that the police should not cooperate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, in apprehending people in our community without documents.

In the last 18 years, war has seldom been out of the headlines. That very day in The New York Times, for instance, one headline was: “U.S. Disputes Finding That Airstrikes on Afghan Drug Labs Killed 30 Civilians.” And war wasn’t far from our community either. During the debate, moderated by the publisher of our local newspaper, I was asked with a gotcha edge, “Are you a pacifist and how will that impact your relationship with Electric Boat?” (Electric Boat, part of General Dynamics, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, makes submarines for the Navy in New London.)

I responded calmly: “I am a pacifist. I believe war is a failure of the imagination, that it is never necessary.” I then went on to talk about what a bad civic neighbor General Dynamics is. The saying goes, I commented, that “Boeing makes planes, Raytheon makes missiles, General Dynamics makes money”—and I reminded the audience that New London sees very little of that money, in part because the company is too busy paying its top execs so much of it. It also receives millions of dollars in federal and state subsidies for workforce training and infrastructure, even when orchestrating stock buybacks to enrich its shareholders. Generally, I championed a future New London divested from militarism.

“Don’t go against General Dynamics,” a man cautioned me after one of the debates, “they are all we got.” This is the game that corporations play against communities like New London, and the military-industrial complex is even better at it than the Amazons and the Ubers.

They are all we’ve got? Really? How sad is that? What do we want as a community? How do we want to be known? We used to be known as the Whaling City, a brutal, dirty business if ever there was one. Now, our town struggles. So many of our kids qualify for reduced lunch that the district offers free lunch to all schoolchildren. But here’s another reality: The majority of those with good-paying jobs at General Dynamics in New London don’t live here. So if that’s all we got, we got problems!

The second debate was held in the basement conference room of our library and in that one (I was less nervous) we were asked about climate change. I responded that, as a mother of three kids who deserve a decent future on this planet of ours, climate change was what kept me up at night. As the mayor of a coastal town, I added, my strategy would be to build for a resilient future.

Under my administration, there would be more planning and less zoning. As a town on the water at a time when sea levels are already rising, we won’t be able to pump and dump our way out of even the five-inch rise in water levels predicted to occur in the next 15 years, which means every new pebble of development needs to be organized through a climate change lens. Parking lots—in other words, stretches of land covered in asphalt? Not when we need to absorb runoff, rather than have it cascading down Garfield Avenue or flooding Broad Street.

Worldwide, climate change hits poor people harder, and New London will be no exception. While the poor here tend to live further from the water’s edge, the dollar-chasing, asphalt-covered businesses along some of our key commercial streets create ideal sites for increasingly regular inland flooding. The elderly living in high-rises are vulnerable to extended power outages when that happens, and, as a food-importing community, our food supply is vulnerable, too. All of this hits poor people harder. With that in mind, I added that, as mayor, I would work to make New London greener, more resilient, and smarter about climate change. There’s no techno-fix for the predicament our fossil-fueled global system has left us in, but we have to deal.

One irony struck me that night, as my opponents labored through their climate change answers: Our debate happened the day after an Ohio Democratic presidential debate during which not a single question was asked about climate change. And that night it rained so hard that a restaurant three blocks from the river’s edge had water pouring in the back door and out the front one.

The third debate, held at a senior center, was less formal than the other two and moderated by an attorney who gave us each 20 minutes to use as we wanted. That night, I pointed out that of the dozen or so departments in the city’s governing structure, only two were run by women, but that I was excited and impressed by how many women were competing for the Board of Education and City Council. (Thirteen women, myself included, ran for public office that election season.)

Asked (as I often was) about my inexperience in politics, I talked about the toolbox of skills I had amassed in an active life (as well as a life as an activist), including community organizing, consensus building, and deep listening, not to speak of a sense of deep accountability I feel for my community. You don’t have to be a lawyer or have a master’s in business administration (my two opponents) to work effectively with New London’s communities. In fact, professional expertise and ego can sometimes get in the way of representing community interests and truly grasping, no less meeting, community needs.

In the end, on that rainy election day in November, 394 people voted for me. It may not sound like much after all those months of effort, but that was more than 10 percent of the vote. As a write-in candidate, people had to know me, truly want to vote for me, remember the writing-in process, and then do it correctly. So each of those 394 votes felt hard-won indeed.

People keep asking me if I’m going to run again. Who knows? The next election isn’t for four years, which feels like a lifetime from now and, believe me (given our world), I have plenty to do in the meantime.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/aoc-local-elections-tom-dispatch/
Our Children Will Be Casualties of Trump’s Presidencyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/our-children-will-be-casualties-of-trumps-presidency/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganOct 4, 2019

Okay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I can’t take the bad news. It’s too much. It’s so extra, as the kids like to say.

When I hit that wall of hopelessness and anxiety so many of us have become familiar with, I take what I think of as a “kid break.” I stare into the faces of my three children seeking solace and sanity. I remind myself that they are the why of it all.

Seamus, who is 7, and I do our special four-part kiss. I arrange 5-year-old Madeline’s hair into Dutch braids or bear-ear buns. Twelve-year-old Rosena and I talk about her five-minute YouTube–inspired craft projects. I connect with those three nodes of antic energy, creativity, and goodness and I feel a little better.

Unfortunately, kid breaks don’t represent a long-term solution to my problem. They’re too brief to keep my hopes afloat, nor is it fair to continually cling to my kids’ narrow shoulders to keep my head above the surging waters. Still, sometimes it really does help to see the world, however briefly, through their eyes, because despite everything, they’re having a good time.

Check out how cool they are: Madeline and Seamus are lying on opposite ends of the couch, both in their pajamas, both reading, both humming under their breath. It’s early morning. Soon they’ll have to go upstairs and get ready for school. From the other room, I reach for my phone to capture this unconscious and beautiful moment, but before I can, Seamus leaps up, adds a lyric to Madeline’s tune and starts dancing, whipping a piece of fabric around his head. She sits up and watches, rapt, humming ever louder.

Seamus spins further into the room until I can’t see him anymore, but I watch her watching him and think: They’re going to be A-OK.

All three of them. Kind and caring of one another and others. But the world they’re growing into is another matter entirely. It’s not A-OK. What do I do about that? I have to do more than daydream that Greta Thunberg will become Queen of the World and declare a carbon-free future by fiat.

“Tronald Dump! Tronald Dump! Tronald Dump!”

One morning, not too long ago, Madeline and I were playing “interview.” It’s a game all of us like in which one person asks random questions and the other has to answer instantly, off the top of his or her head. Sometimes, admittedly, it can get tedious (for me, at least), because they always start by asking, “What’s your favorite animal?” and they remember if I mention a different one than last time.

On this day, as it happened, I needed the game to distract Madeline, while I put a pair of hand-me-down school-uniform pants on her, so I played it, machine-gun style:

“Who is your favorite person?”

“My family and everyone in the whole world,” she responded instantly.

“Just name one person.”

“Can I say three? Bronwyn, Autumn, and JoJo!” Those are her friends from the neighborhood. I’m hoping that one of these days they’ll start a band and, as I’ve told them, call it “JoJo and the Sea Walls.” It’s an inside joke that panders to girls 6 to 60 who are obsessed with Jojo Siwa, a 16-year-old cultural phenom with giant hair bows and glitter-encrusted dance numbers. Still, they weren’t amused and probably won’t let me manage the band.

“What’s your favorite song?”

“Why Don’t You Just Meet Me in the Middle.” Okay, maybe they’re not quite as A-OK as I like to imagine, since “The Middle” is a truly repulsive earworm of a song, especially when its lover-duet lyrics are sung by a five year old.

“What’s your least favorite food?”

“Hot sauce and anything spicy.”

“Who’s your least favorite person?”

“Michael Jackson and Donald Trump. I hate them!”

And there it was, direct from the black-and-white world of a 5-year-old: the pop idol who sang lead on “ABC,” the song they love, and who also hurt kids: a fact they know from too much exposure to National Public Radio and a long car ride ill-timed to coincide with breaking news about the release of the documentary film Leaving Neverland. (Its topic was Jackson’s child sexual abuse.) And—why am I not surprised in our household?—the illegitimate president of the United States who yells and throws tantrums like a spoiled 5-year-old, lies like a spoiled 7-year-old, tweets like a spoiled 12-year-old, and more than two-and-a-half years after entering the Oval Office continues to rewrite the rules of the game and the world in ways that are anything but healthy for children, not to speak of other living things.

Madeline is fierce and funny and fragile like any 5-year-old. I fear that the world Donald Trump is taking such a hand in creating won’t have room for her—and, on some deep level, I suspect, she senses that, too, and it makes her mad.

The news on NPR was playing in the kitchen one morning recently when Madeline came in. “Turn it off!” she demanded, her voice stentorious and aggrieved. “I do not want to hear that man’s voice today!” Another morning, seeing the president’s photo in the newspaper on the table, she pounded it with her fists, chanting, “Tronald Dump! Tronald Dump! Tronald Dump!”

Now that Madeline is in school—she started kindergarten after Labor Day—she’s trying to be a nicer person. She talks a lot about how she needs to be “nice.” So, after declaring that Michael Jackson and Donald Trump were the worst people in the world, she added, her voice thick with a saccharine school-edge, “But I would still treat them nicely.”

She says it, in fact, with such fervor that initially I wonder whether she’s inverted the meaning of the word nicely. If she hasn’t, she may have to. The Trump administration is taking out after the future of my kids and Madeline, her brother, and her sister sense it.

The Donald’s Assault on the Future

Before Donald Trump was a household word as a hotelier, a womanizer, and the 45th president of the United States, “trump” was a verb meaning to supercede, dominate, outrank. How perfect, as it happens, for a man who is, in all modesty, trying to trump the future—Madeline’s, Seamus’s, and Rosena’s.

President Trump Is Attacking Their Environment

He’s selling off national parks to loggers and miners, making fervently sure that ever more carbon will be pumped into the skies, and that more noxious chemicals and industrial waste will flow into the waters of this land.

We live in New London, Connecticut, a relatively small town, just 5.5 square miles, so 2 million acres is incomprehensible to me. But that’s the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments out West. Or at least it was until Trump’s Interior Department began moving to shrink these wild public lands for the benefit of private interests.

National Geographic has been keeping track of his administration’s abuse of natural resources. By now, it has recorded 15 major assaults on the natural world since he entered the White House in January 2017, including the undermining of the Endangered Species Act. Until July 2018, the act that protects the black-footed ferret and the grizzly bear, among many other species, put more weight on safeguarding their imperiled habitats than on economic considerations. Once this administration got its hands on it, however, the money side instantly won out and the animals and the rest of us (including my kids) lost.

In August, The New York Times counted 84 environmental laws or regulations that the Trump administration has already rolled back with more to come, even as it promotes pipelines and works to open previously pristine national parks to oil and natural gas drilling. According to a recent report prepared by New York University Law School’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, such changes “could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality every year.”

Not so surprisingly, my kids love ferrets and bears and butterflies and want clean water and clean air.

Trump Is Attacking Their Education

He’s slashing public education budgets, opening space to even more for-profit schools, and modeling a bully swagger that’s a caricature of every bad kid.

My kids go to good public schools in New London. The little ones attend schools that offer theater, music, and visual arts every week. The older one is in a nonprofit charter school that focuses on interdisciplinary work and community investment, while cultivating a strong, kind school culture. They are all thriving and happy; the schools themselves, less so. Each of them is struggling, while the message from the top is: Make do with less.

A budget analysis from the Center for American Progress finds that the Trump administration’s 2020 education budget proposal would eliminate 29 public school programs, including after-school programming in poor communities and professional development for teachers, while cutting a total of $8.5 billion, a 12 percent decrease from the fiscal year 2019 budget. Over the last two years, the Department of Education has suggested even more massive cuts, though Congress has rejected them. We can only hope that its members will again “just say no” to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s grim proposals. Still, even the money that does get to cities and municipalities is so much less than what such schools and their teachers and kids really need.

The public college scene is bleak, too. The way things are looking now, my kids may be going to plumbing school! College has never been more expensive and recent moves by the Department of Education have made accrediting for-profit colleges that bilk their students so much easier.

Trump Is Attacking Their Future

The world is on fire. That phrase used to be a rhetorical device for expressing the urgency of problems. Now, from the Amazon to Indonesia’s forests, it’s literally, as well as existentially, true! Donald Trump is making the future so much more perilous for my children by lowering the bar for nuclear war and accelerating the pace of the climate crisis.

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, has been ringing the alarm bell about climate change for decades. The Columbia University professor has shown vividly how, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, Earth’s climate has already moved above the temperature range that supported the previous 10,000 years of civilization. In “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” a “hothouse Earth” scenario put together by leading ecologists in 2018, they suggested that, if greenhouse gas emissions weren’t cut—and they’re still rising!—with reasonable rapidity, there could be a point of no return. Critical planetary systems could spiral out of control, causing “serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies,” even if those emissions were then curbed in a serious way. This should terrify us all, at least for our children’s sake, if not our own.

And speaking not just of something, but of someone who should terrify us all, consider President Trump’s recent response to hurricane season. “Nuke ’em,” he suggested during a hurricane briefing at the White House and he wasn’t just kidding around. He meant it! The president actually said, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” Given how many of our tax dollars go to nuclear weapons, there should be some use for them, right? We should deliver true “fire and fury” somewhere, so why not directly into the eye of a hurricane? Despite having no true military superpower rival, the United States is on track to spend $494 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis, and closer to $2 trillion over the next three decades.

Trump Is Attacking Their Bodies

In Trump’s world, health care is not a right, it’s a gold-plated privilege that makes lots of money for his friends in the insurance industry. In the meantime, he’s fighting Obamacare and Medicare for All, and in that fight, he sets himself against three kids I love.

It Shouldn’t Be Donald Trump’s Future (Which Is No Future at All)

To say the least, all of this leaves me distressed, disturbed, and depressed. Under the circumstances, it’s easy enough to just throw up my hands and bury my head in the sand. That, unfortunately, doesn’t help Seamus, Madeline, and Rosena one little bit, nor does it help the millions of other kids threatened by the Trumpian assault on the future. So I carry on, putting one foot in front of the other and doing my best to keep working, however small the scale, for the better future that President Trump is so eager to deny them.

After all, the future doesn’t belong to him or to me. It belongs to my kids and your kids and all the generations to follow.

The skies, the mesas, the old growth forests, the seas, and everything else, all the richness, beauty, diversity of our ecosystem doesn’t belong in Donald Trump’s wallet. It’s ours, not his. It belongs to all of us—and none of us—at the same time. That means our job, above all, is to protect it and so our children, all of them!



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/our-children-will-be-casualties-of-trumps-presidency/
Parenting in a World Hurtling Toward Catastrophehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/parenting-generation-hot-global-warming-climate-change/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganMar 14, 2019

Kids are taking over the streets in other countries, rallying and chanting and refusing to go to school one day a week.

Young people across the world are striking to draw attention to the ravages of climate change. They are demanding—with their bodies and their voices—that the catastrophe each of them will inherit be a priority for the grown-ups around them. They are insisting that we adults make some sacrifices to keep their planet from becoming uninhabitable.

“We are the voiceless future of humanity…. We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes.” You know who said that? A teenager. Actually, lots of them, since it’s part of a letter, a call to action, from the organizers of Fridays for a Future. I’m hearing them loud and clear, and it’s driving me crazy!

The map of activities that those teenagers planned for their March 15 global day of action represented a mind-popping collection of locations, including Tromso, Norway; Port Louis, Mauritius; Diliman, the Philippines; Osorno, Chile; Whitehorse, Canada; Bamako, Mali; and Tehran, Iran. You don’t have to be a cartographer to notice that there are way more actions planned around the world than in Donald Trump’s United States.

This clarion call comes from teenagers, the crew we characterize here in America as eye-rolling creatures suspended in a helpless state of consumerism, hyper-sexualization, and crushing academic pressure. Of course, there are kids in the streets (and sitting in at congressional offices) for climate change (and for a host of other issues) here, too, but, there are far more doing nothing but playing Fortnite on their phones or tablets and uploading DIY lip-balm videos on YouTube.

Seventy-three percent of Americans now acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change—by far the biggest number since the question was first asked in 2008—but too few want to pay to make it go away. Asked if they’d spend even $10 a month to address the crisis, 72 percent of Americans took a hard pass, 57 percent of them opting for $1 a month instead. Set that against the cost of your favorite large iced latte with a shot of caramel, a Netflix subscription, or the Uber ride you summoned when you could have walked.

If global warming continues at current rates, however, Solomon Hsiang, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues found that it would impact our economy in a huge way. It would shave “3 to 6 percentage points off of the country’s gross domestic product by century’s end—the warmer it gets, the bigger the hit to the economy.” The Trump administration’s own report assessing the risks of climate change found that global warming “is expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy throughout this century…. With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states.”

Time for another latte, folks, because this is our problem, whether we’re facing it or not.

How Do We Parent Generation Hot?

I’m almost 45. My kids, Seamus and Madeline, are 5 and 6; my stepdaughter Rosena is 12. They are part of what journalist Mark Hertsgaard calls Generation Hot, “some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its mounting impacts.”

On a good day, I quip that “I’m halfway to 90.” On a bad day, I can’t imagine what the world will look like in 2064, for me or them.

I was named for my paternal grandmother, Frida. Born in 1886 in the Black Forest of Germany, she emigrated here with her family when she was very young, grew up in Minnesota, and married my grandfather in June 1911. I was married exactly a century later. I wear her wedding ring, a battered little gold band that connects me to a woman who died before I turned 2. The world she bore six sons into wasn’t an easy one. She spent a lot of her time washing laundry, mending clothes, tending crops, caring for animals, preparing food, and raising children, a life I can romanticize the heck out of in the right mood.

Had she been able to leave her small world and travel into my future, so much of my daily life would undoubtedly be a marvel, a mystery, or a concern to her. I suspect, for example, that the hours I sit in front of this computer wouldn’t even look like work to Grandma Frida.

And if I could fast-forward 45 years into the future, what would I see? On the marvels and mysteries, I haven’t a clue, but I do know one thing: I would certainly see an extreme version of today when it comes to climate change. In other words, the indiscriminate damage from extreme weather, hitting vulnerable populations particularly hard, will only have intensified dramatically. After all, 2018, the wettest year in America in 35 years, saw 14 weather catastrophes, each of which cost a billion or more dollars. It was also the fourth-hottest year on record for the planet as a whole (the other three being the previous three years), according to data tracked by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report only predicts more and far worse of what we have already been seeing: droughts, floods, rising sea levels and heat indices, increasingly fierce wildfires, more food shortages and famines to come, and ever larger populations on the move as people flee the weather and the destruction, look for food and shelter, and try to escape the man-made conflicts fueled by such events.

Worries for the World

That’s Rosena’s future I’m writing about, and Seamus’s and Madeline’s, too. I’ve been making a concerted effort as a parent of small children and an almost-teenager, as a citizen of the United States, and as an environmentalist (or at least someone who would like to wear that mantle) to face my own denial reflex on climate change. Until now, thanks in part to my own parents, I’ve spent most of my life worrying about nuclear weapons destroying the planet. So maybe it’s just a matter of layering one world-destroying phenomenon on another.

The strange thing is that I find it easier to think about nuclear war than climate change. After all, when it comes to those nukes, either the button gets pushed or it doesn’t. A finite number of nuclear warheads exist on this planet and they could be dismantled one by one in a relatively short period of time if policy-makers chose to do so. The genie could potentially be put back in the bottle. Climate change is another matter.

Oh, and talking to my kids about it? That’s a terrifying thought. They’re already deeply afraid of volcanoes for no reason whatsoever. Going to Chicago for a wedding? First question: “Are there volcanoes there?” A weekend trip to New York: “Wait, mom, volcanoes in New York? No, right?” Now, imagine introducing them to the human-made, carbonized version of volcanoes that will actually impact their future.

I’d rather not, but I’m thinking I must. That, I suppose, is the work of parenting in 2019.

Rosena has a few months more before she becomes a teenager and there is not (yet) a lot of eye-rolling in our household. Thankfully, she remains more kid than adult wannabe on the cusp of womanhood. But the climate-change kids have me thinking harder about her and the fate of her earth. I’m thinking she should know more than she does about the mess the baby boomers got her into.

But who or what is really to blame for all of this, anyway? The Industrial Revolution? The war machine? Big Oil? When you’re talking about a staggering 1.5 to 2 (or even 4) degree Celsius increase in global temperatures, I suppose there’s bound to be plenty of blame to spread around.

My husband and I bug Rosena for taking long showers and for her urge to turn on every light in the house. We make her walk to and from school and try to walk as a family as much as possible. We point out how much of what she loves to buy is packaged in non-recyclable, landfill-clogging insta-garbage. We joke that slime is the cause of icebergs melting, bee-colony collapse, and every other ill in the world, but we haven’t yet started harping on global warming, greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events.

For a while, I hesitated, not wanting to worry her pointlessly. But there is a point to worrying! As I’ve watched the next generation pour into the streets, I’ve been rethinking things. I’ve started to feel that our family needs to be learning all of this together. It needs to be united in the fight against climate change and in the preparations for a very different future, for Rosena’s future.

Is It Time to Panic Yet?

After my own version of a survey of the recent literature, here’s what I know: we’re screwed.

David Wallace-Wells, a legit climate Cassandra, is tired of public intellectuals and scientists candy-coating the bleakness of the future that awaits us unless everything changes fast. So, in a new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, he looks at the worst-case scenarios and says it’s time to panic! A fellow at the New America Foundation, he recently told Rachel Martin of NPR’s Morning Edition that “when I talk about being optimistic, I’m talking about a range that starts at a death toll of 150 million people and extends to a world 4 degrees warmer where we would have, eventually, hundreds of feet of sea level rise, horrible impacts on agriculture and public health beyond our comprehension. Now, a lot of people would want to just sort of recoil from even that best-case scenario.”

Where do you go from that version of “best case”? Is there such a thing as productive panic? David Wallace-Wells still thinks so.

Climate change certainly makes me consider my occasional hamburger, or retail therapy at T.J. Maxx, or my low-key Amazon Smile addiction—it can’t be bad if it’s for a good cause, right?—where things I “needish” are wrapped in countless layers of the paper and plastics that contribute to those dead seas of plastic junk that now clog our oceans. At this point, human activity reportedly consumes 1.7 Earths’ worth of materials annually. As the Global Footprint Network points out:

This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester.

But the personal stuff—not driving, eating meat, or buying plastic crap—won’t, of course, do the trick. Collective action is needed. Frida Berrigan’s becoming a vegan won’t reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 45 percent. To get there, we need a whole new set of relationships, as well as rules and regulations. We need to live collectively, not just individually, as if the planet matters. We need, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot has put it, “a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet.”

Look for Action

Turning towards this catastrophe is hard work. Here’s just a sampling of the titles of recent books about climate change: The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption; Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change; Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity; The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; and This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America.

You get the idea. No wonder I struggle with what to do with all this information, this mixture of artful alarmism and sober grappling with the facts on the ground. I’m sure Greta Thunberg would be impatient with my waffling and indecision, my fervent wish that this would all just go away. She was 15 years old when she sat down outside the Swedish parliament and “school striked for the climate.” She was inspired by the young people of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who began organizing a true gun-control movement after 17 of their schoolmates and staff were killed by a mass shooter. She was motivated by her understanding of the existential threat posed by a warming world, driven to action by her observation that none of the adults with the power to change the rules were doing anything. That includes me, doesn’t it?

They—we—were failing, she concluded. Why, she wondered, wasn’t it illegal to burn carbons? Why wasn’t it forbidden to trash the planet? Greta, who has a young person’s passion and absolutism, is also diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which, as she told a crowd at a TED Talk, makes her see the world in black and white. “There are no grey areas when it comes to survival,” she noted, her voice dry and lightly accented. She ended that TED Talk by saying, “We do need hope. Of course we do. But one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So, instead of looking for hope, look for action.”

So she acted and the school strikes for climate change she launched soon spread across the world. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal could be considered one answer to Greta’s call for action. Along with the venerable Senator Ed Markey, Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman representative and youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is proposing that Green New Deal “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers; to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States; [and] to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

And I’m all for it. Every single word, even the ones that are being denounced as too expensive, unrealistic, challenging, and anti-corporate. And I’m even more for the new conversation this wave of climate concern is catalyzing. One of these days, we might even have an actual national debate about what it will take to arrest the increases in global temperature that could lead to the demise not of the planet itself, but possibly of human civilization.

Everything Is… (Not) Fine

The fact that many of us still look at the possible cataclysm to come through a distracting everything-is-fine vision of America makes that conversation all the harder. Here in Connecticut, for instance, gas is still only $2.39 a gallon, the local Stop and Shop has three-for-one pints of blueberries from Peru or Chile on offer, and on a recent wintry Friday it was almost 50 degrees.

It can be hard to tap into one’s sense of urgency living here in the Northeast. And yet we are not immune. Our library hosted an event on city trees at the end of January and I learned that New London’s six square urban miles had lost more than 1,000 trees in the last 10 years. They’ve been cut down after storm damage, removed for new sidewalks, died of old age and of the hard life of a tree living at the street’s edge. A college senior who had counted all the city’s trees and assessed their health told us about how they filter pollutants while offering shade. My community is organizing to get those trees back (and plant even more of them), but we’ll probably fall a few short of the 1.2 trillion new trees that one recent study suggests would be needed to cancel a decade of carbon-dioxide emissions.

Like all the other homeowners in New London, I now find a $15 stormwater surcharge on the water bill that arrives every quarter. It’s not quite the $10 a month climate-change tax Americans were polled on, but it is related to a warming world and it’s hitting some of my neighbors pretty hard. Our community, after all, is bordered on three sides by water and (like increasing numbers of American communities) our water infrastructure is antiquated. It gets overwhelmed by even a modest downpour. We’re not talking about Miami-level sunny-day flooding, but we could get there and, if so, it will probably take a lot more than $60 a year to keep us reasonably safe.

Southeastern Connecticut isn’t on the front lines of climate change. Ours are still third- or fourth-level problems related to a warming, more resource-pinched world. Our community probably won’t be uninhabitable in the next generation. Our home is likely to withstand the next round of mega-storms. Still, we are all beginning to pay for climate change, even if the costs and consequences have yet to fully register. Taken individually in New London (if not Puerto Rico or Houston), it’s been a matter of minor inconveniences and background noise, little more than so many phantom twinges.

Still, I have no doubt that we’re in trouble. Trouble deep. And I’m not going to lie to my kids. I’m not going to deny that I’m terrified about their future. I’m not going to fail as an adult. I still have work to do. I can still do my small part to help the school strikers and the members of Generation Hot who have identified the “right to live our dreams and hopes” as a right worth defending. I’m not going to fail as a parent. I’m already listening to the school strikers, many just a few years older than Rosena. I’m going to heed their leadership. I plan to join them, to learn and listen, to do my best to share my still inarticulable fears and, with my children, to face this future together.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/parenting-generation-hot-global-warming-climate-change/
25 Years in Jail for Protecting the Planet?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-activism-kings-bay-plowshares/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganFeb 18, 2019

Twenty-five years in prison.

That is the possible fate of seven Catholic anti-nuclear activists awaiting trial for their action on April 4, 2018, at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia—the largest base of its kind in the world.

The Kings Bay 7 chose to act on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in order to lift up King’s analysis of the “triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism.” There are six Trident submarines based at Kings Bay, Each submarine can carry 24 submarine-launched ballistic missiles  designated Trident D5. Each of those missiles can carry up to eight 100-kiloton nuclear warheads (about 30 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb). Plowshares activist Patrick O’Neill, one of the co-defendants, called Trident “the most insidious and evil weapon of mass destruction ever constructed.”

Carrying hammers and baby bottles filled with their own blood, the seven attempted to transform weapons of mass destruction using the ancient metaphors of “swords into plowshares” and “spears into pruning hooks” from Hebrew Scriptures. With their action, they hoped to call attention to the ways in which nuclear weapons kill every day, by their mere existence and maintenance. They are charged with three federal felonies and one misdemeanor for their actions.

It bears repeating: They could face 25 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

On Sunday, nearly 200 people came to Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to hear from the four of the Kings Bay 7 who are out on bond. Clare Grady, Martha Hennessey, Patrick O’Neill, and Carmen Trotta were all able to participate in the event. Father Steve Kelly, Mark Colville, and Elizabeth McAlister (my mother) remain jailed in Brunswick, Georgia.

The event began with a 15-minute excerpt of The Nuns, The Priests and the Bombs. The film focuses on two Plowshares actions—one at a naval base near Seattle in 2009 and another at the Y-12 nuclear facility in Tennessee in 2012—and the role of the Catholic conscience in spurring the activists to this radical form of action.

Helen Young, one of the filmmakers, was present at the event. She hopes that her film encourages the public to pay closer attention. “Sadly,” nuclear weapons have “become the purview of security experts and activists, while the public has remained largely disengaged,” she said, “or not engaged on a level commensurate with the existential threat we face. I believe we all owe a debt of gratitude to the activists featured in this film who have put their lives on the line in an effort to wake us all up and pull us back from the nuclear brink.”

The 2012 action at Y-12 drew widespread media attention and triggered congressional hearings because it highlighted lapses in nuclear-weapons-complex security. As William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy noted on Sunday, “The mainstream media coverage and the reaction in Congress were more about how to protect the weapons from protesters than to protect us from the weapons. This rhetoric about safety and security of the weapons complex, and protecting ‘special materials’—a euphemism for ingredients for bombs that can end life as we know it—distracts from the real issue: These are weapons of mass slaughter that must be eliminated before they eliminate us.”

The Kings Bay Plowshares action has not garnered the same kind of front-page, bold-type treatment from the mainstream media, and the event on Sunday was the first time the defendants have been able to appear together and speak publicly about their action.

Carmen Trotta, a longtime member of the New York Catholic Worker, shared that he had never committed a felony before. “I could not not do it,” because they “were all dear friends” and he felt compelled to act. The April 4, 2018, action was the most recent of more than 80 nonviolent Plowshares disarmament actions that have been carried out since 1980. Trotta said that with each action the message is the same: “Nuclear weapons are necessarily evil.” That “message is not what the courts want to hear. But that is the message that we keep bringing.”

Patrick O’Neill, a Catholic Worker and father of eight from Raleigh, North Carolina, told the audience, “At present, we seven are in a lengthy pretrial holding pattern as we await the government’s response to our various motions that argue our actions were a legal response to US deployment of weapons of mass destruction that stand at the ready to bring to an end the human experiment. We and our great team of lawyers are arguing our case on the basis of US law, international law, necessity and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to name a few.”

Martha Hennessey splits her time between her family’s farm in Vermont and the New York Catholic Worker, which was founded by her grandmother Dorothy Day. She shared that she was motivated to participate in the action by her time in Iran and Korea and spending time with the people labeled the “enemy” by the United States. After prayer and discernment, “I came to a place of having to personally look at my life, my privilege and where I stand in the world” and take “responsibility for this situation.” The action was “incredible” and the “greatest test of my faith,” she said.

Clare Grady, a mother of two and Catholic Worker activist from Ithaca, New York, participated in the Griffiss Plowshares in 1983 (Elizabeth McAlister was also a member of that action) and talked about the difference between those two actions 35 years apart. Her motivation this time around was “not just the fear of if these weapons are launched,” but also her growing awareness that nuclear weapons “kill every day in the mining and testing on Native lands.” She continued that “We have awakened to the need to attend to something we have neglected,” namely, the intersections of militarism, racism, and materialism.

As the four activists spoke, the larger context of their action came into sharp focus. There is an international, grassroots movement to abolish nuclear weapons, and a landmark global agreement to ban nuclear weapons, known officially as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was adopted in July 2017. But none of the nine nuclear states participated in the negotiations. Nuclear-weapons spending in the United States continues to rise, and President Donald Trump’s threatening bombast and willful ignorance puts a new, sharper edge on the sword of Damocles President John F. Kennedy warned against so long ago. And, as many of those gathered remarked, anti-nuclear demonstrations are not drawing the million people who crowded Central Park in 1982.

Bill Moyers, celebrated journalist and conscientious newsman, was at the Fordham event and remarked that as the United States is withdrawing from international arms-control treaties and moving us all closer to nuclear midnight, Plowshares actions are an “essential reminder that there is an alternative—a radical alternative—for the protection of the planet.”

The defendants, their legal team, their wide circle of supporters, their families (together, the defendants have 20 children and 16 grandchildren), all hope they can accomplish these critical aims without spending the next 25 years in prison.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-activism-kings-bay-plowshares/
Earth’s Greatest Threats Lie With Humanshttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/earths-greatest-threats-lie-with-humans/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganOct 2, 2018

don’t want to live in a world without cheetahs, Mom.”

Seamus loves cheetahs and what’s not to love—unless you are a Thomson’s gazelle? Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on the planet, formidable predators, sleek, saucy looking, and they even have spots.

My 6-year-old boy can’t imagine a future without his favorite animal, but we live in the small city of New London, Connecticut. Unlike coyotes, cheetahs are, to say the least, rare here. The nearest zoo is more than an hour away. I’m not sure where his love for cheetahs came from, since he doesn’t watch much television, not even nature shows. Still, here we are, my 6-year-old boy and me talking about those cheetahs and the end of nature on a Sunday morning.

His observation actually turned out to be remarkably on point when it comes to our current situation, globally and environmentally. He made it during a week in which nature was hitting back hard. If cheetahs are indeed endangered, so were surprising numbers of human beings that week as killer storms struck from the Philippines to North Carolina. With rage and rain, an increasingly overheated, climate-changed Mother Nature briefly reclaimed some of her territory, which we had defiled, dividing it up into endlessly buildable lots all the way to the high-tide line, pocking it with hog farms, studding it with nuclear power plants. Hurricane Florence and Super Typhoon Mangkhut flooded the works, making the whole sodden mess hers again, at least for a time, and sending a signal about what humans and cheetahs are up against in the decades to come.

Unlike Seamus, I haven’t given cheetahs much thought. Still, after he expressed his worries about that cat and his life, I did a little research. Cheetahs, you won’t be surprised to learn, live throughout Africa (northern, eastern, and southern), as well as—and this was news to me—in India and Iran. There are only seven or eight thousand cheetahs left on Earth. Once upon a time (and not so long ago) there must have been 100,000. They are speedy and range widely over their habitats. They want to move. They are also killed as pests by farmers, taken as trophies by big-game hunters, and regularly hit by cars careening down the growing number of roads crisscrossing their territories.

Headed Toward Oblivion

I’ve never seen a cheetah in real life. Neither has my son. And, if truth be told, I’m no cheetah champion either. I don’t even particularly like tabby cats. Still, I found that, in the wake of our conversation, I didn’t want to live in a world without them either.

In 2012, when Seamus was born, 196 species of mammals were already “critically endangered,” the animals closest to extinction. Today 199 are in this most endangered category and 37 more species than when he was born are “endangered,” the next level down, according to the “Red Lists” maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. We don’t see this dramatic decline of species variety in our little corner of the world. It’s all squirrels and raccoons here and they seem to be winning always, but what scientists are calling “the sixth extinction” is as real as the possum now going through my recycling bin.

From cheetahs and other endangered big mammals, it’s only a short hop to what environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert says are “a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays…a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds” that are “headed toward oblivion.” And it’s but another short hop to other forms of obliteration and climate collapse, including the rapid decline of coral reefs, the growth of ocean dead zones, the retreat of sub-Arctic boreal forests, the “new-normal” of a raging fire season, the cracking and melting of what was once the strongest ice in the Arctic…

I could, of course, go on, but the mind shudders. Or thought of another way, the mind shutters. It forms a protective shell against what it can’t truly take in—or, at least, what it can’t comprehend without radical change.

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 6-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 Scientists moved 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 28—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, DC, 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.”

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 United States has already been spending about $20 billion a year to maintain the USnuclear 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 6-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!



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/earths-greatest-threats-lie-with-humans/
How to Be a Pacifist in a Gun-Loving Countryhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-to-be-a-pacifist-in-a-gun-loving-country/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganApr 16, 2018

Guns. In a country with more than 300 million of them, a country that’s recently been swept up in a round of protests over the endless killing sprees they permit, you’d think I might have had more experience with them.

As it happens, I’ve held a gun only once in my life. I even fired it. I was in perhaps 10th grade and enamored with an Eagle Scout who loved war reenactments. On weekends, he and his friends camped out, took off their watches to get into the spirit of the War of 1812, and dressed in homemade muslin underclothes and itchy uniforms. I was there just one weekend. Somehow my pacifist parents signed off on letting their daughter spend the day with war reenactors. Someone lent me a period gown, brown and itchy and ill-fitting. We women and girls spent an hour twisting black gunpowder into newspaper scraps. I joked that the newspaper was anachronistic—the previous week’s Baltimore Sun—but no one laughed.

A man came by with a long gun, an antique, resting on the shoulder of his jerkin to collect our “bullets” and he must have read the gun terror written on my face.

“Wanna give it a try?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, stumbling to my feet, pushing my gown out of the way, and trying to act like I didn’t have broken-rifle patches, symbols of the pacifist War Resisters League, all over my real clothes. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I took the heavy weapon in my way-too-small hands. He showed me how to wrestle it into position, aim it, and fire. There were no bullets, just one of my twists of powder, but it made a terrifying noise. I shrieked and came close to dropping the weapon.

And there it was: the beginning, middle, and end of my love affair with guns—less than a minute long. Still, my hands seemed to tingle for the rest of the afternoon and the smell of gunpowder lingered in my hair for days.

Got Guns?

One in four Americans now owns a gun or lives in a household with guns. So how strange that, on that day in the late 1980s, I saw a real gun for the first and last time. I grew up in inner-city Baltimore. I’ve worked at soup kitchens and homeless shelters all over the East Coast and stayed at dozens of Catholic Worker Houses around the country—Providence, Camden, Syracuse, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles—every one in a “tough” neighborhood. I lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the mid-1990s, before you could get a $4 coffee or a zucchini scone on Van Brunt Street, before there was an Ikea or a Fairway in the neighborhood. All those tough communities, those places where President Trump imagines scenes of continual “American carnage,” and I’ve never again seen a gun.

Still, people obviously own them and use them in staggering numbers and in all sorts of destructive ways. Sensing that they’re widespread beyond my imagination, my husband and I have started asking the parents of our kids’ school friends if they own guns when we arrange play dates or sleepovers. We learned this from the father of a classmate of my 11-year-old stepdaughter Rosena. The dad called to make the arrangements for his son to come over after school. We talked logistics and food allergies and then he paused. “Now, I am sorry if this is intrusive,” he said, “but I do ask everyone: Do you keep guns in your house?” He sounded both uncomfortable and resolute.

I almost choked on my urge to say, “Don’t you know who I am?” In certain odd corners at least, my last name, Berrigan, is still synonymous with muscular pacifism and principled opposition to violence and weaponry of just about any kind, right up to the nuclear kind. But that dad probably didn’t even know my last name and it probably wouldn’t have meant a thing to him if he had. He just wanted to make sure his son was going to be safe and I was grateful that he asked—rather than just assuming, based on our Volvo-driving, thrift-shop-dressing, bumper-sticker-sporting lifestyle, that we didn’t.

“You know how kids are,” he said after I assured him that we were a gun-free household. “They’ll be into everything.”

And right he is. Kids are “into everything,” which is undoubtedly why so many of them end up with guns in their hands or bullets in their bodies.

“Do you question everyone about their guns?” I asked the dad. He replied that he did and, if they answered yes, then he’d ask whether those weapons were locked away, whether the ammunition was stored separately, and so on.

“Thank you so much. I think we need to start doing that too,” I said as our conversation was ending and indeed I have ever since.

It’s a subject worth raising, however awkward the conversation that follows may be, because 2 million kids in this country live in homes where guns are not stored safely and securely. So far this year, 59 kids have been hurt in gun accidents of one sort or another. On average, every 34 hours in our great nation a child is involved in an unintentional shooting incident, often with tragic consequences.

The National Rifle Association’s classic old argument, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” takes on a far harsher edge when you’re talking about a 7-year-old accidentally killing his 9-year-old brother with a gun they found while playing in an empty neighboring house in Arboles, Colorado.

Two weeks after we learn this new parenting life skill in this oh-so-new century of ours, my husband Patrick is on the phone with a mom arranging a sleepover for Rosena. I hear him fumble his way through the gun question. From his responses, I assume the mom is acknowledging that they do have guns. Then there’s the sort of long, awkward silence that seems part and parcel of such conversations before Patrick finally says, “Well, okay, thanks for being so honest. I appreciate that.”

He hangs up and looks at me. “They do keep guns for hunting and protection, but they’re locked up and out of sight,” he tells me. “The mom says that the kids have never tried to get at the guns, but she understands the dangers.” (He had heard in her voice apology, embarrassment, and worry that the guns might mean no sleepover.)

I grimaced in a way that said: I don’t think Rosena should go, and he responded that he thought she should. The two of them then had a long conversation about what she should do and say if she sees a gun. She slept over and had a great time. A lesson in navigating difference, trusting our kid, and phew… no guns made an appearance. And we know more about our neighbors and our community.

Anything Can Be a Gun

My son Seamus, 5, received an Easter basket from a family friend. He was happy about the candy, of course, and immediately smitten with the stuffed bunny, but he was over the moon about what he called his new “carrot gun.” It wasn’t a toy gun at all, but a little basket that popped out a light ball when you pressed a button.

The idea was that you’d catch the ball, put it back in, and do it again. But that wasn’t the game my kids played. They promptly began popping it at each other. His little sister Madeline, four, was in tattle mode almost immediately. “Mom, Seamus is shooting me with his carrot gun!”

“Mom, Mom, Mom,” he responded quickly, “it’s a pretend play gun, not a real play gun. It’s okay.” He made popping noises with his mouth and held his hand as if he were grasping a genuine forbidden toy gun. It was an important distinction for him. He’d been a full-throated participant in the March for Our Lives in Boston on March 24, chanting with the rest of us “What do we want? Gun control! When do we want it? NOW!” for four hours straight.

At the march, he pointed out that all the police officers managing traffic and the flow of people were wearing guns on their belts.

“I see a gun, Mom,” he kept saying, or “That police officer has a gun, Mom.”

Repeatedly, he noticed the means to kill—and then four days after that huge outpouring of youth-led activism for gun security, Stephon Clark was indeed gunned down in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento, California. The police officers who shot him were looking for someone who had been breaking car windows in the neighborhood and they fired 20 shots into the dark in his direction. The independent autopsy found that he had been hit eight times, mostly in his back. Clark turned out to be holding only a cell phone, though the police evidently mistook it for a tool bar, which could have done them no harm from that distance, even if he had wielded it as a weapon.

Maybe the police saw a weapon the same way my 5-year-old son sees one. He can make a stick or just about anything else, including that little basket, into a “gun” and so evidently can the police. Police officers have killed black men and boys holding pipes, water hose nozzles, knives, and yes, toy guns, too.

Where Does the Violence Come From?

Parkland (17 killed, 14 wounded). Newtown (28 killed, 2 wounded). Columbine (15 killed, 21 injured). School shootings are now treated as a structural part of our lives. They have become a factor in school architecture, administrator training, city and state funding, and security plans. The expectation that something terrible will happen at school shapes the way that 3- and 4-year-olds are introduced to its culture. Part of their orientation now involves regular “shelter in place” and “secure-school” drills.

At my daughter’s preschool, the kids are told that they’re hiding from rabid raccoons, those animals standing in for marauding, disaffected white boys or men roaming the halls armed. As parents, we need to do more than blindly accept that these traumatic exercises are preparing our kids for the worst and helping them survive. Kids are vulnerable little beings and there are countless dangers out there, but they have a one-in-600 million chance of dying in a school shooting. We endanger them so much more by texting while driving them home from school.

After every episode of violence at a school—or in the adult world at a church, night club, concert, movie theater, or workplace like San Bernardino’s Inland Regional Center or the YouTube headquarters—there’s always a huge chorus of “why?” Pundits look at the shooter’s history, his (it’s almost always a guy) trauma, and whatever might be known about his mental health. They speculate on his (or, in the rare case of those YouTube shootings, her) political leanings, racial hatreds, and ethnic background. The search for whys can lead to hand wringing about hard-driving rock music or nihilistic video games or endemic bullying—all of which could indeed be factors in the drive to kill significant numbers of unsuspecting people—but never go far enough or deep enough.

Two questions are answered far too infrequently: Where do the guns come from? Where does violence come from?

Guns of all sizes and description are manufactured and sold in this country in remarkable numbers, far more than can be legally absorbed in our already gun-saturated land, so thousands of them move instead into the gray and black markets. Evidence of this trend shows up repeatedly in Mexico, where 70 percent of the weapons seized in crimes between 2009 and 2014 turned out to be made in El Norte. We have an estimated 300 million guns in this country, making us first by far in the world in gun ownership and some of them couldn’t conceivably be used for “hunting.” They are military-style weapons meant to tear human flesh and nothing but that—like the AR-15 that 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz legally bought and used in his grim Parkland shooting spree.

This country, in other words, is a cornucopia of guns, which—honestly, folks—doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the Second Amendment.

Where does the violence come from? I’ve already shared my inexperience with guns. Now, let me add to it my inexperience with violence. I don’t know what it’s like to have to react in a split second to or flee an advancing perpetrator. No one has ever come at me with a gun or a knife or a pipe, or anything else for that matter. And I count myself lucky for that. In a nation in which, in 2016 alone, 14,925 people were killed due to gun violence and another 22,938 used a gun to kill themselves, it’s a significant thing to be able to say.

And yet, I know that I’m the product of violence (as well as the urge, in my own family, to protest and stop it): the violence of white privilege, the violence of American colonialism, the violence of American superpowerdom on a global scale… and that’s no small thing. It’s a lot easier to blame active-shooter scenarios on poor mental-health screening than on growing up in a world layered with the threat of pervasive violence.

Power is about never having to say you’re sorry, never being held accountable. And that’s hardly just a matter of police officers shooting black men and boys; it’s about the way in which this country is insulated from international opprobrium by its trillion-dollar national security state, a military that doesn’t hesitate to divide the whole world into seven US “commands,” and a massive, planet-obliterating nuclear arsenal.

And don’t think that any of that’s just a reflection of Trumpian bombast and brutality either. That same sense of never having to say you’re sorry at a global level undergirded Barack Obama’s urbane dispassion, George Bush Junior’s silver spoon cluelessness, Bill Clinton’s folksy accessibility, George Bush Senior’s patrician poshness, Ronald Reagan’s aura of Hollywood charm, and Jimmy Carter’s Southern version of the same. We’re talking about weapons systems designed to rain down a magnitude of terror unimaginable to the Nikolas Cruzes, Dylann Roofs, and Adam Lanzas of the world.

And it doesn’t even make us safe! All that money, all that knowledge, all that power put into the designing and displaying of weapons of mass destruction and we remain remarkably vulnerable as a nation. After all, in schools, homes, offices, neighborhoods across the country, we are being killed by our kids, our friends, our lovers, our police officers, our crumbling roads and bridges, our derailing trains. And then, of course, there are all those guns. Guns meant to destroy. Guns beyond counting.

So what might actually make us safer? After all, people theoretically buy the kind of firepower you might otherwise use only in war and pledge allegiance to the US war machine in search of some chimera of safety. And yet, despite that classic NRA line—“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun”—are we truly safer in a nation awash in such weaponry with so many scrambling in a state of incipient panic to buy yet more? Are my kids truly on the way to a better life as they practice cowering in their cubbies in darkened classrooms for fear of invading rabid “raccoons”?

Don’t you think that true security lies not in our arming ourselves to the teeth against other people—that is, in our disconnection from them—but in our connection to them, to the web of mutuality that has bound societies, small and large, for millennia? Don’t you think that we would be more secure and so much less terrified if we found ways to acknowledge and share our relative abundance to meet the needs of others? In a world awash in guns and fears, doesn’t our security have to involve trust and courage and always be (at best) a work in progress?

As for me, I’m tackling that work in progress in whatever ways I can—with my neighbors, my town, my husband, and most of all my children, educating them in the ways violence scars and all those weapons just increase our journey into hell, never delivering the security they promise.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-to-be-a-pacifist-in-a-gun-loving-country/
How Can I Prepare My Children to Grow Up in Trump’s America?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-can-i-prepare-my-children-to-grow-up-in-trumps-america/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganJan 8, 2018

As a mother and an activist, here’s what I’ve concluded as 2018 begins: It’s getting harder and harder to think about the future—at least in that soaring Whitney Houston fashion. You know the song: “I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way…” These days, doesn’t it sound quaint and of another age?

The truth is I get breathless and sweaty thinking about what life will be like for my kids—3-year-old Madeline, 5-year-old Seamus, and 11-year-old Rosena. I can’t stop thinking about it either. I can’t stop thinking that they won’t be guaranteed clean air or clean water, that they won’t have a real health-care system to support them in bad times, even if they pay through the nose in super high taxes. They may not have functional infrastructure, even if President Trump succeeds in building a huge gilded wall on our southern border (and who knows where else). The social safety net —Medicare, Medicaid, and state assistance of various sorts—could be long gone and the sorts of nonprofit groups that try to fill all breaches a thing of the past. If they lose their jobs or get sick or are injured, what in the world will they have to fall back on, or will they even have jobs to begin with?

The country—if it even exists as the United States of America decades from now when they’re adults—will undoubtedly still be waging war across the planet. Our Connecticut town, on a peninsula between Long Island Sound and the Thames River, will be flooding more regularly as sea levels rise. And who knows if civil discourse or affordable colleges will still be part of American life?

What, I wonder all too often, will be left after Donald Trump’s America (and the possible versions of it that might follow him)? Will there, by then, be an insurgent movement of some sort in this country? Could Indivisible go rogue (please)? Maybe they’d have a nonviolent political wing the way the Sandinistas did in Nicaragua in the 1980s? With the help of volunteers from all over the hemisphere, they eradicated illiteracy, brought in the coffee harvest, and vaccinated against diseases (while their armed wing fought against the US-backed Contras). Maybe in our city, my grown-up kids can harvest potatoes—no coffee grows here, not yet, anyway—teach reading, and write revolutionary propaganda.

And when it comes to dystopian futures, I’ve got plenty more where that came from, all playing in a loop on the big screen in the multiplex of my mind as I try to imagine my kids as adults, parents, grandparents. Please tell me I’m not the only one in America right now plagued in this fashion. I’m not fixated on passing our modest family house down to my three kids or making sure that our ragtag “heirlooms” survive their childhood. What preoccupies me is the bleak, violent, unstable future I fear as their only inheritance.

It’s enough to send me fumbling for a parental “take back” button that doesn’t exist. I just don’t know how to protect them from the future I regularly see in my private version of the movies. And honestly, short of becoming one of those paranoid, well-resourced doomsday preppers, I have no idea how to prepare them.

Recently, I had a chance to school them in the harshness of life and death—and I choked. I just couldn’t do it.

Death and Breakfast

“When will I die, mama?” Madeline asked at breakfast one day recently. She’ll be four next month. Her tone is curious, as if she were asking when it will be Saturday or her birthday.

“Not for a long time, I hope,” I responded, trying to stay calm. “I hope you’ll die old and quiet like dear Uncle Dan.”

“I want to die LOUD, mama!”

I’m not sure what she means, but already I don’t like it.

“I want to die like a rock star!” her brother Seamus interjects. He is in kindergarten and thinks he’s both wise and worldly.

Great, I think, just great. What does that mean? “Yes,” I say, my voice—I hope—neutral, “rock stars do tend to die, buddy.”

“Do kids die, mom?” he asks suddenly.

“Yes,” I reply, “kids die sometimes.”

My head, of course, is suddenly filled with images of dead kids, little Syrian bodies washing up on Turkish beaches, little Afghan bodies blown to bits, little Yemeni bodies brittle with starvation or cholera. There’s no shortage of images of dead children in my head as I talk with a kind of painful calmness to my two small ones on a school-day morning in southeastern Connecticut.

“Do teenagers die?” Seamus asks. They love teenagers.

“Yes,” I say, my voice heavy and sad by now, “teenagers die sometimes, too.” New images swirl through my head of teenagers drunk, in cars, on drugs, in stages of undress, in mental anguish, dying because they don’t believe they can. I keep all of this to myself.

“People die,” I say, trying to regain control of the conversation. “We all die eventually. But you don’t have to worry. You have a lot of people working hard to make sure you have what you need to live long, happy lives.”

Long, Happy Lives and Other Lies

And that was the end of that. Their existential, morbid curiosity satisfied for the moment, they moved on to an argument about the fantasy character on the back of their cereal box.

I, on the other hand, haven’t moved on. I’m still right there, sitting at that breakfast table discussing life and death—the when, the where, and the grim how of it all—with my 3-year-old and 5-year-old. And wondering if I’ve already failed them.

When I was a kid, my own parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, Catholic peace activists who spent long stretches of time in jail as nuclear-weapons-disarmament activists, never missed a chance like this to knock into my head some hard lessons about the power structure’s monopoly on violence. Innocent queries about life and death were regularly met with long discourses on nuclear weapons and how such Armageddon weaponry threatened to ultimately cheapen all life, including mine and those of my brother and sister.

To this day, I can still replay those homemade history lessons that regularly began with tales of rapacious white colonizers landing on these shores, wiping out Native Americans from sea to shining sea, and launching the succession of seizures, invasions, and wars that built the United States into an imperial power and guaranteed its future global dominance. (At a certain age, we could even follow along in our own copies of A People’s History of the United States by their friend Howard Zinn). Those lessons were an education in violence and its bloody, brutal efficacy, at least in the short term. They were also an introduction to its fundamental failures, to the way such violence, deeply embedded in a society, requires an accompanying culture of pathological distraction, fearfulness, and deep insecurity.

That was my childhood. Some version of that once-upon-a-time-in-America, no-sleep-for-you nuclear nightmare of a bedtime story was always playing in my house. And thanks to their clear-eyed, full-disclosure approach to parenting, I grew up feeling prepared for a brutal, unequal, unfair world, but in no way protected from it. At least as I now remember it, I felt exposed, terrified, and heart-broken too much of the time.

If Madeline and Seamus were 10 years older and asking such questions, what would I have told them? If their big sister and my step-daughter Rosena (who lives with us half the time) were there, would I have been less circumspect? Could I have shared my fears of the future and the myriad ways I dread the passing of each year? Like my parents, would I have held forth on the long-term consequences of our settler-colonial origins, the ways the use of force and violence at the highest levels have come to permeate society, corroding every interaction and threatening us all? Could I have lectured them on guns, drugs, and sex—on the cheapening of life in the era of the decline of this country’s global version of a Pax Americana? Would I have pulled back the curtain to show them that everyone is not working hard to make sure that they—or any other kids—have what they need to lead long, happy lives? I don’t think so.

All these years later, I’m not convinced of what such rants—however well reasoned and well footnoted—truly accomplish. I’m not convinced of what such demoralizing verbal versions of a Facebook scroll of bad news and hypocrisy do for any of us, which is, of course, why I’m sparing my kids, but dumping all my fears on you.

A World on Fire and on the Move

As for my kids, I tried my best to keep that breakfast of ours in the upbeat realm of death-is-part-of-life. That’s where I want to live with them. That’s how my father died—as he lived, surrounded by the people who loved him. His two closest brothers died that way, too. When I imagine the deaths of those I love, I hear a last gasp of breath, feel a last grip of fingers, witness a peaceful slumber that doesn’t end.

But the peace that I treasured in my father’s death, the joyful stability I want for my children, these things that I can tell myself are the bedrock of a meaningful life, are already denied to so many people on this planet. In fact, in a world engulfed in flames (both the literal and figurative fires of war), increasing numbers of them are running as fast as they can in hopes of somehow getting away.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, 1.7 million people are reportedly displaced, mostly fleeing from one part of that vast African nation to other regions to escape spreading violence. In total, 4 million people are displaced within that fractured land alone. Similarly, in Myanmar, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group subjected to terrible violence, have been on the move in staggering numbers. In the wake of a deadly crackdown by that country’s security forces, 647,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh where many are now living in fetid, desperately overcrowded refugee camps. And that’s just to mention two countries on an increasingly desperate planet.

Last year, an estimated 65.6 million people were displaced, a record for the post-World War II period, and tens of millions of them crossed a border, becoming refugees as they fled war, poverty, persecution, and the destruction of urban areas (from major cities to small towns). They regularly left their homes with what they could carry, kids on their hips, in search of imagined safety somewhere over the horizon, just as people have done for millennia, but increasingly—with a 21st-century twist —consulting Google maps and WhatsApp, while constantly sharing intel on social media.

And scientists are predicting that this world in motion, this world already aflame, is just the prologue. As the effects of global climate change become more pronounced, the number of displaced people will double, then triple, and possibly only continue to grow.

Charles Geisler, an emeritus development sociologist at Cornell University, predicts that 2 billion people may be displaced by rising sea levels by the turn of the next century. Coastal peoples will press inland, while farmland off the coasts is likely to be increasingly compromised by drought and desertification. He concludes: “Bottom line: Far more people are going to be living on far less land, and land that is not as fertile and habitable and sustainable as the low-elevation coastal zone.… And it’s coming at us faster than we thought.”

Madeline and Seamus will be in their 80s (god willing) when Geisler’s predictions come to pass. They can’t, of course, know about any of these possible catastrophes, but I already sense that they’re picking up on something subtly fragile and vulnerable about our relatively settled lives together. How do I respond to them? What do I as a parent do in the face of such a potentially bleak future? How and when do I break news like that? Am I supposed to help my children cultivate a taste for crickets instead of hamburger or start building a solar powered hydroponic farm in our basement? Worse yet, whatever I could imagine suggesting wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t protect them. It wouldn’t even prepare them for such a future.

I’m No Fireman

In 1968, my uncle, Dan Berrigan, called Vietnam the “land of burning children” in a beautiful polemic he wrote to accompany a protest by a group that came to be known as the Catonsville Nine. He and eight other Catholics—including my father (long before he was a parent)—publicly burned hundreds of draft files at a selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland, a symbolic attempt to obstruct the sending of yet more young men to the killing fields of Vietnam. My father served years in prison due to actions like that one. Throughout my life, my family drew hope from such creative acts of resistance, elaborate and effective performances of street theater that extended right into the courtroom and sometimes the jailhouse. My uncle, a poet and Jesuit priest, turned that Catonsville trial into an award-winning play that’s still performed.

And yet, despite their sacrifices, almost half a century later, children are still on fire and I’m no fireman. I’m not breaking into whatever the equivalent of draft boards might be in the era of the all-volunteer/all-drone military. I’m not sitting in at my congressman’s office either. I’m nowhere near a “movement heavy” (a Sixties-era term I often heard applied to my dad). I’m just a gardener who tries to be a good neighbor, a mother who tries to look after a whole community of kids. I’m just one more set of hands. And even though these hands of mine are working hard, my efforts feel ever more paltry, inadequate, token.

Still, I’ll get up tomorrow morning and do it again, because if my efforts don’t matter, what does? I’ll hug my kids tight, answer their endless questions, and try to equip them for a future that scares the hell out of me. Even if I can’t see that future clearly, I do know one thing: It will be desperate for love, humor, some kind of balance, and the constant if distracted probing of inquisitive children.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-can-i-prepare-my-children-to-grow-up-in-trumps-america/
There’s a Fascist in the White House. Time to Grow Your Own Food.https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/theres-a-fascist-in-the-white-house-time-to-grow-your-own-food/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganJul 11, 2017

In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 soared onto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity. Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now stalking the American imagination in ever-greater numbers and no wonder, given that guy in the Oval Office. Certainly, 2017 is already offering up a bumper crop of dystopian possibilities and we’ve only reached July. But let me admit one thing: The grim national mood and the dark clouds crowding our skies have actually nudged me in a remarkably positive direction. Surprise of all surprises, Donald Trump is making the corn grow in Connecticut!

Maybe I’d better explain.

My kids and I planted corn seeds in a square bed in our front yard this spring. Really, they just dumped the kernels in the ground and stared expectantly, waiting for them to grow. Three hundred corn plants seemed to germinate overnight, crowding each other out as they worked to reach the sun. I’ve been steadily thinning the clumps into rows and now we have a neat line of a dozen or so corn plants, each just about three feet high, along with lettuce, kale, collards, peas, basil, and a few tomato plants in a four foot by four foot raised bed. The kids—Madeline, 3, and Seamus, 4—visit “their” corn plants, name them, argue over whose are whose, and generally delight in their bona fides as Connecticut corn growers.

It’s all part of a (somewhat incoherent) plan of mine that’s turned most of our front yard over to vegetables this year, including more tomatoes sprouting beside that raised bed along with plenty of cilantro. We have a fig tree, too, and apple trees, blueberry bushes, even a Shinto plum in back of the house along with a little potato patch and more herbs of various sorts. It’s a fertile little urban oasis.

For water supplies, I went as far as to install rain barrels at our downspouts, which tend to quickly fill to the brim whenever we get a half-decent rain and then cause moisture problems in the basement as water begins to gush out of their mosquito-proof tops. I worry about those barrels whenever I go away, but also feel a strange pride when I water my vegetable patches from them instead of the hose. If I stop to think about it, however, they drive home the point even better than a haphazard row of jaunty corn: I have no idea what I’m doing.

That’s not the end of the world, though, is it? This spring, as the political scene turned from truly bad to criminally bad, I began to see how not knowing what you’re doing could be a legitimate path, if not to power, then to resistance—and therapeutic as well.

Seriously, it was therapeutic to dig and plant, weed and water. It was healing to do that with my kids, to hear them teaching each other about a world of growing things, to watch them go from grossed out to awed by worms and beetles, to see them bend their noses almost to the earth to follow the wiggly movements of such creatures. We’re now picking peas from plants that grew from seeds Seamus planted in little cups at the end of his school year. Every time we come home, he says, “Daddy, look at how tall my peas are!” and he runs over to trace their curly tendrils as they climb the twines we tied.

It’s Pretty, But Can We Eat It? Stalking Self-Sufficiency

Sometimes, when the dystopian possibilities of our world sink in, I think about the importance of self-sufficiency. Still, to be perfectly honest, given the costs of the rain barrels and the lumber for those raised beds, given my time and effort and ignorance, we may be growing some of the world’s most expensive peas, tomatoes, and kale. And it’s not like we have to wait for the kids’ corn to grow (and cure) to make popcorn.

We do, however, make a lot of our own food. We bake sourdough bread from a pungent starter kept in the fridge. We ferment our own yogurt and stir up batches of granola every few weeks. It’s fun. It’s work our whole family gets into. It helps teach our kids what real food tastes like—that yogurt doesn’t come naturally in a plastic tub loaded with sugar and fruit on the bottom; that bread can emerge from the oven hot and chewy and is best eaten at that moment slathered in butter.

Like all but a microscopic number of Americans, however, no matter how we toil in our spare time, most of our food doesn’t come from anywhere nearby, thanks to the wonders of the global transportation system and the work of exploited laborers in distant fields and orchards. My kids eat berries all year round, not just in those wondrous brief windows when our little strawberry patch produces and our blueberry bushes bend with their weight of blue orbs. The pecans for our granola are a product of the U.S.A.—so says the bag without specifying where exactly the trees grew in these 50 nifty states of ours—and are certified kosher. The flour for our bread holds the same secrets. Where did that wheat grow?

We live in New London, Connecticut, a small city in a small state. Throughout the summer months, you can go full bore locavore and feed your family Connecticut-grown milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, beef, and pork, serve local wine, and all sorts of locally caught or raised seafood. No bananas or chocolate or coffee of course, but the bounty of our state has inspired food producers, professors, and policy people to promote New England as a “food shed” potentially capable of growing, processing, and distributing enough stuff to essentially feed itself. It’s a goal of such types to locally produce 50 percent of all food distributed within New England by 2060, thanks to programs to promote the retention of family farmland, an expansion of urban gardening, and a generational effort at education. Right now, however, 90 percent of our food is grown outside both the state and New England.

You might be wondering at this point whether such an agrarian vision isn’t both utopian and utterly retro. After all, why worry about locally grown food when we can Fresh Direct asparagus in November?

You Never Know…

I work part-time for a small nonprofit that builds and manages community gardens. It employs (and hopefully empowers) young people to do the physical labor and community improvement work of growing food in and for our urban center. As we were organizing a new community garden in a poor and isolated part of our small city recently, a woman told me that she was excited about growing her own food because “you never know when they are going to stop shipping food in here.”

Over-the-top paranoid? Maybe. But it rang a bell of worry with me. Yes, the planet is changing radically and an erratic and vengeful man in the Oval Office eggs it on. Donald Trump now being the boss of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet puts a new spin on the phrase “You’re fired!” So, the thought that we might be left to fend for ourselves in New London seems less than paranoid these days—but of course maybe I’m just paranoid!

History shows that empires fall, that money can suddenly lose its value (think of the Weimar Republic just before the rise of Adolf Hitler), that promises can be broken, and treaties trampled, that rain can suddenly stop falling, and madmen can consolidate power, and it may someday show that martial law can be declared by tweet. Who, in fact, knows what can happen on our extreme planet, which means that we need to learn how to do things, make things, grow things, fix things ourselves instead of assuming that others will continue to do all of it for us. I need to learn how. My kids need to learn how. Enough at least to do our best to take care of ourselves and our neighbors.

Write all of this off as my overactive imagination, if you wish—fed by works like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Cormac McCarthy’s The Roadbut my own lack of self-sufficiency has been on my mind for a while. And on that score, I do have cause for alarm. With luck we won’t have to fend off the zombies or defend our turf from some future well-armed local militia, but as of now we can barely protect our blueberries from the birds or our lettuce from the grubs.

My front-yard garden is modest and haphazard at best, but working on it does make me notice and admire the other front-yard gardeners in my neighborhood. A woman up the street has an amazingly impressive crop of tomatoes and string beans coming in. Two streets over, someone built hoop houses in their front yard and grew greens of various sorts all winter long.

When I pluck my own kale leaves and feel connected to the larger urban farming community, all of us eating something out of our own yards, I’m sometimes reminded of the Victory Gardens of the World War II era. Back then as a practical response to war-induced scarcities and to a massive and sophisticated propaganda campaign, Americans dug up their lawns in staggering numbers and put in gardens, turning the clock back briefly on rapidly suburbanizing communities and industrializing lives. For a few years, neighborhood farmers genuinely helped feed America.

Victory Gardens have their spot in the history of the home front in World War II, but I was surprised to learn recently that they actually date back to the First World War. In 1917 and 1918, Americans planted 8 million gardens, producing food worth $875 million. In that era of war against Germany, those home-front farmers even renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.” Embedded in the propaganda of the time, however, was an early recognition that Americans had lost something real in the concrete jungles of the country’s cities and that it was still possible to reestablish a connection to the land and be producers again, no matter where you lived.

Victory Gardens and Zombies from Washington

When World War I ended, however, most Victory Gardeners put down their hoes and went back to buying food, not growing it—until, that is, 12 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when the National Defense Gardening Conference revived the idea and everyone got back to work. In those war years, many farmers were drafted and food and fuel were rationed. Meanwhile, the War Department’s propaganda machine launched a brilliant campaign to promote “Victory Gardens” to grow food for family consumption and canning for the winter months.

A poster of that time caught the mood of the moment perfectly: A suburban housewife, her arms full of lidded glass jars, her eyes wide with excitement or exasperation (or both), exclaims, “Of course I can! I’m patriotic as can be—and the ration points won’t worry me.” Victory Gardens enlisted women, children, the elderly, and the infirm in the war effort. Everyone had a role. In 1943, 20 million gardens produced 8 million tons of food; more than 40 percent of all the vegetables consumed in the nation. That remains a phenomenal feat and it wasn’t just restricted to front and backyards. The city fathers of San Francisco turned over the lawn at City Hall to local farmers; the Boston Commons was quilted with gardens; and public land nationwide was hoed and rowed and made to produce.

Now, I dislike rank propaganda as much as the next person, but face it, Victory Gardens were cool! And the posters appeal to so many traits we think of as inherently American: can-do-it-ness, self-sufficiency, hard work. In those years, Rosie the Riveter was joined by Wendy the Weeder and Peggy the Planter and, miracle of all miracles, those Victory Gardens helped feed America just as they had in the previous world war. Not too long ago and a million years before the advent of the Internet, we did that. It’s possible again.

Start Feeding Hope

In the age of Trump, however, it’s so much easier to focus on what we can’t do and on what disastrous harm is being done to us and the country. We can’t build bridges, or get out of any of our wars, or scrub the insides of industry smokestacks, or even think about stopping those global waters from rising. But, if we put our minds (and hands) to it, we can still grow food, block by block, yard by yard, and feel a hell of a lot less dystopian in the bargain.

What would it be like to be mobilized by my government—and I emphasize “my” because as far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump’s version of it doesn’t qualify—into some collective effort to make this country a better place.

When we entered World War II, the United States rushed onto a war footing and, disastrously enough, in many ways it’s never gotten off it again—except when it comes to the public. We Americans were demobilized long ago when it comes to war, even as military spending headed for the heavens (or for hell on Earth) and the national security state became the defining branch of government. We, who are eternally to be kept “safe” by that militarized state are also eternally not to raise a hand when it comes either to the war “effort” or much else.

No Victory (or in this era, possibly, Defeat) Gardens for us. Few of course could even name all the countries in which the U.S. military is at war these days, no less list the strategic or political goals behind our trillion-dollar conflicts. Many of us don’t know any active duty service members in our now “all-volunteer” military. Our eyes tend to glaze over when we stumble on a war news story.

All our government has wanted from us in its war effort (and this has been totally bipartisan) is our complacency, our inattention, our distracted and ill-informed consent or at least passivity. In exchange, our leaders regularly suggest to us that there’s no need for sacrifice or scarcity or hardship on our part. We are, that is, to be prepared for nothing.

President Trump has put a new twist on this American compact. He’s ready to mobilize us, but only to render him our loyalty (whatever that may mean) and adoration. Giving him such loyalty these days is a growing white supremacy movement emboldened to emerge from the shadows and into the streets with its hate and violence on display. The Trump presidency has certainly provoked disdain, disgust, mistrust, resistance, and protest—but so far, not sustained, alternative, creative activity, the sort of things that would support this country literally and figuratively over the true long haul.

Still, Victory Gardens are alive and well, at least in Milwaukee. There, the Victory Garden Initiative will come to your house (if you ask them and pay them) and install garden beds in your yard. In the Bay Area, a “gardener on a tricycle” will deliver your Victory Garden starter kit and build garden beds for you out of untreated redwood. For those thinking about sustainability in tough times, you can find a dozen books that contemplate the concept.

I must admit that I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of calling our front yard a Victory Garden, but it is at least vibrant and vital. It already sustains me (and Madeline and Seamus) in tough times, even if it will be months before we can actually eat the few ears of corn our little patch produces, if the birds and bugs don’t feast on them first.

The kids want to have a corn party with our neighbors. It’s an idea that fills me with satisfaction, even if those ears won’t nourish us for more than a few minutes. Still, our fleeting (and delicious) ability to feed one another might help us grow a bigger patch next year and face with a greater sense of self-assurance whatever zombies Washington sends our way.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/theres-a-fascist-in-the-white-house-time-to-grow-your-own-food/
The New Patriotismhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-new-patriotism/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganFeb 16, 2017How to find community and sustain a tradition of nonviolence amid Trump chaos.]]>

So reality has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life. It didn’t take long. Yes, Donald Trump is actually the president of the United States. In that guise, in just his first weeks in office, he’s already declared war on language, on loving, on people who are different from him—on the kind of world, in short, that I want to live in. He’s promised to erect high walls, keep some people in and others out and lock up those he despises, while threatening to torture and abuse with impunity.

Still, a small personal miracle emerges from this nightmare. It turns out that, despite growing up an anarchist protest kid who automatically read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States alongside the official textbooks, I love this country more each day. So I find myself eternally upset about our new political reality-show, about a man so thin-skinned he lashes out at everything and so insulated in his own alt-reality that no response to him seems to matter.

Above all, I am so mad. Yeah, I’m mad at all those people who voted for Trump and even madder at the ones who didn’t vote at all. I’m mad at everyone who thinks the sum total of their contribution to the political well-being of this country is voting every two or four years. I’m mad at our corporate-political system and how easily distracted people are. I’m steaming mad, but mostly at myself.

Yep, I’m mad at myself and at the Obamas. They made empire look so good! Their grace and intelligence, their obvious love for one another and the way they telegraphed a certain approachability and reasonableness. So attractive! They were fun—or at least they looked like that on social media. Michelle in the karaoke car with Missy Elliot singing Beyoncé and talking about global girls’ education! Barack and a tiny Superman at a White House Halloween party. Michelle, unapologetically fierce after Trump’s demeaning Access Hollywood comments came to light. I loved those Obamas, despite my politics and my analysis. I was supposed to resist all his efforts at world domination through drones and sweeping trade deals and instead I fell a little bit in love, even as I marched and fasted and tried to resist.

Falling in Love With My Country

Now, we have a new president. And my love is gone, along with my admiration, my pride, and my secret wish to attend a state dinner and chat with the Obamas over local wine and grass-fed beef sliders.

What’s not gone, though, what’s strangely stronger than ever, is my love for this country.

I didn’t love the United States under Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bush the First. I was a kid and they were names on protest banners and headlines in the news. My parents were the Catholic peace activists Liz McAlister and Phil Berrigan, and I grew up in an anarchist collective of Christian resisters. My parents and their friends went to jail repeatedly and resolutely. We demonstrated, rallied, and railed at every institution of power in Washington. Those presidents made the adults around me angry and agitated, so they scared me.

I didn’t love the United States under Bill Clinton either—I was young and in college and opposed to everything—nor under George W. Bush. I was young and in New York City and still opposed to almost everything.

I started calling myself a “New Yorker” three years after moving there when, on a sunny Tuesday morning, airplanes became weapons, tall towers fell, and 3,000 people died. I emerged from my routine subway ride at 14th Street, unaware and unscathed, to stand still with the rest of the city and watch the sky turn black. I spent the rest of that day in Manhattan with friends trying to reach my parents and following the news, as we all tried (and failed) to come to grips with the new reality. Once the bridges reopened, we walked home to Brooklyn that evening, terrified and shell-shocked.

9/11 provided the rationale for sweeping changes in Washington. War by fiat, paid for in emergency supplementals that circumvented Congressional processes; a new Department of Homeland Security (where did that word “homeland” even come from?); a proliferation of increasingly muscular intelligence agencies; and a new brand of “legal” scholarship that justified both torture and indefinite detention, while tucking secret black sites away in foreign countries. All this as the United States went to war against “terrorism”—against, that is, an idea, a fringe sentiment that, no matter how heavily weaponized, had been marginalized until the United States put it on the map by declaring “war” on it.

The United States then invaded and occupied big-time, including a country that had nothing to do with the terrorists who had attacked us, and we’ve been at war ever since at a heavy cost—now inching toward $5 trillion. Conservative estimates of how many people have been killed in the many war zones of what used to be called the Global War on Terror is 1.3 to 2 million. The number of US military personnel who have lost their lives is easier to put a number to: more than 7,000, but that doesn’t count private contractors (aka mercenaries), or those (far more difficult to quantify) who later committed suicide. Now, President Trump has begun adding to this bloody death toll, having ordered his first (disastrous) strike, a Special Operations raid on Yemen, which killed as many as 30 civilians, including children, and resulted in the death of an American Navy SEAL as well.

September 11th was a long time ago. But I finally fell in love with my country in the days following that awful attack. I saw for the first time a certain strain of patriotism that swept me away, a strain that says we are stronger together than alone, stronger than any blow that strikes us, stronger in our differences, stronger in our unities. I’m talking about the kind of patriotism that said: Don’t you dare tell us to go to Disney World, Mr. President! (That was, of course, after George W. Bush had assured us that, while he made war, our response as citizens to 9/11 should be to “get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”)

Instead of heeding that lame advice, some of us went out and began to try to solve problems and build community. I had read about it in books—the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—but I hadn’t seen it myself, hadn’t been a part of it before, and I fell in love.

Of course, the drumbeat for war started instantly in Washington and was echoed throughout the nation, but many of us—the intended victims of that attack—said “our grief is not a cry for war.” We circled around the victims’ families; we reminded America that it wasn’t only lawyers and hedge-fund managers who died that day, but cooks and couriers and homeless people and undocumented immigrants, too.

We pulled people from the rubble. We made the “pile” a place of sacred memory long before a huge monument and gift shop were erected there. We honored the first responders who died, we stood up for Muslims and Arabs and all those whom ignorance scapegoated. We marched against war in Afghanistan and then in far vaster numbers against war in Iraq. We called for an international police response to those acts of terrorism—that weapon of the weak, not the powerful—instead of the unilateral, militarized approach adopted by the Bush administration. We celebrated, and saw as a strength, New York’s incredible diversity. We made art and music and poetry. We prayed in all languages to all the names of God.

The Donald, a One-Man 9/11

I guess I’ve been thinking about September 2001 again because, only weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump already seems like a one-man 9/11. He’s ridden roughshod over business as usual without even a geopolitical crisis or calamity as an excuse—and that’s not so surprising since Trump himself is that calamity.

With a razor-thin mandate, considerable bluster, and a voracious appetite for alt-facts (lies), he’s not so much tipping over the apple cart as declaring war on apples, carts, and anything else beginning with the letter A or C.

It seems almost that random and chaotic. In these weeks, he’s shown a particular appetite for upending convention, saying screw you to just about everyone and everything, while scrapping the rules of decorum and diplomacy. With a sweep of his pen and a toss of his hair, he takes away visas, nullifies months of work by advocates for refugees, and sends US Special Forces off to kill and be killed. With a few twitches of his thumbs he baits Mexico, disses China, and throws shade at federal judges. With a few ill-chosen words about Black History month (comments that would have been better written by my 10 year old), he resurrects Frederick Douglass, disparages inner cities, and slams the “dishonest” media again (and again and again). His almost-month as president can be described as busy and brash, but it barely hides the banality of greed.

Flying Our Flag

Sure, Donald Trump’s a new breed, but perhaps in the end our resistance will make him the aberration he should be, rather than the new normal. So many of his acts are aimed at demeaning, degrading, demonizing, and denigrating, but he’s already failing—by driving so many of us to a new radical patriotism. I’m not the only one falling in love with this country again and this love looks like resistance—a resistance that, from the first moments of the Trump era, has seemed to be almost everywhere you looked.

Even at his inauguration, a group of young people stood on chairs wearing matching sweatshirts spelling out R-E-S-I-S-T in big letters. They had positioned themselves in the inner ring of the Capitol and were loud and visible as Chief Justice John Roberts swore the new president into office. The environmental group Greenpeace greeted Trump’s White House with a daring banner drop from a crane across the street—a huge, bright banner also emblazoned with RESIST. Pink woolen “pussy hats” were popularized by the Women’s March, a global event and possibly the largest demonstration in American history, one that rekindled our hope and strengthened our resolve on inauguration weekend. Now, those hats help us recognize and salute one another.

We’re working hard. We’re tying up the phone lines all over Capitol Hill, turning town halls into rowdy rallies for health care and human rights, shelling out money to support Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the immigration lawyers fighting for people barred from the United States and the closest Black Lives Matter chapter. We’re getting organized, getting trained, getting prepared, and getting connected. And we’re doing it all with a sense of humor: the Bowling Green Massacre Victims Fund? Priceless!

We are, in short, resisting in old ways and new.

Given my background, it’s no surprise that I’m not a flag waver. While growing up, I learned a lot more about what was wrong with my country than about what was right with it. But I’m seeing so much that’s right about it in this new Trump era of engagement or, if you prefer, call it radical patriotism. I’m mad… I’m scared… I’m hopeful… I’m still in love—more so than ever—with this country Trump is trying to hijack.

I don’t live in a big city any more. I’m not a scrappy kid in my early thirties either. I’m a mother of three kids and a homeowner. I’ve sunk my roots in a small, struggling, stalwart community along Connecticut’s eastern shoreline and I’m planning to live here for the rest of my life.

New London is a community of 27,000 or so, poor and diverse. It’s almost a majority-minority community, in fact. We’re home to three refugee families settled from Syria and Sudan. We have a good school system, getting better all the time. Every Wednesday, the chefs at the middle school up the street from my house cook a meal, open the cafeteria, and invite the whole community to eat dinner for five dollars per person. I went with my girls a couple of weeks ago for Cajun shrimp stew and white rice. The room was full and the mood was high. Young professionals and hipsters with kids ate alongside folks who had just stood in line for an hour and a half for a free box of food from the United Way across the street and gotten a free meal coupon as well for their troubles.

New London’s mayor held a press conference soon after in the lobby of City Hall where the heads of all the city departments asserted their support for immigrants and refugees in our community. The last city council meeting was standing room only as people pushed an ordinance to keep fracking waste out of our area.

The weekend after the inauguration, my husband and I raised a flagpole on the second story porch of our house and hung a rainbow peace flag from it. I look up at it every morning waving in the breeze and I’m glad I live here, in this country, in this moment of radical upsurge and a new spirit of patriotism.

I’m talking to my neighbors. I’m going to city council meetings. I’m writing letters to the editor of our local paper. I’m taking my Sudanese neighbors grocery shopping and to the post office. I’m loaded for bear (nonviolently, of course) if anyone tries to mess with them.

My kids are the anti-Trumps. “We went to the women’s march in Hartford, Mommy,” 2-year-old Madeline shouts every time she hears the word woman. She knows enough to be proud of that. “Look, Mommy! They have a flag like ours!” says 4-year-old Seamus with delight whenever he sees another rainbow, even if it’s just a sticker. He’s learning to recognize our tribe of patriots.

We’re engaged, we’re awake, we’re in love, and no one is taking our country from us.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-new-patriotism/
How a Nun, a Vet, and a Housepainter Stood Up to the Threat of Nuclear Weaponshttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-a-nun-a-vet-and-a-housepainter-stood-up-to-the-threat-of-nuclear-weapons/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganAug 31, 2016Dan Zak’s Almighty reminds readers that the United States’ poisonous and very expensive history of nuclear-weapons production is far from over.]]>

Dan Zak’s Almighty: Courage, Resistance and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age is a must read for everyone in this country who has forgotten about nuclear weapons. And that is most of us, isn’t it?

Engineers, physicists, military planners, arms control wonks, diplomats, and some politicians—they all get paid to remember that the United States has an almost unique capacity for nation destruction. The three people profiled in Almighty are among the handful who haven’t forgotten. But they aren’t professionals of any kind. In fact, Dan Zak refers to them as “the sister,” “the veteran,” and “the house painter.”

They call themselves Transform Now Plowshares, and on July 28, 2012, the nonviolent peace activists penetrated Y-12, a heavily guarded nuclear facility tucked within the hills and valleys of Tennessee. After cutting through fences and hiking miles in the dark, they reached the outer walls of the complex’s highly enriched uranium materials facility. The HEUMF—which sounds like a noise Winnie the Pooh would make falling out of a honey tree—is the Fort Knox of fissile material, designed to store 400 metric tons of highly enriched uranium. Once there, the activists painted religious, anti-nuclear slogans on the walls of a building, laid banners on fences, and poured their own blood across the facility’s walls. They then prayed and sang until being apprehended by security. This author knows all three of the activists: Sister Megan Rice, a Catholic nun, was 82 years old then. Her companions, Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, were younger: 63 and 57.

Walking through the plant, they were acting in line with a Plowshares tradition that spanned back further than 30 years. The first was in 1980, when eight people, inspired by a passage from the book of Isaiah that envisions transformation—“they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore”—broke into a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania that manufactured reentry systems for the Minuteman Missile. They hammered on nose cones, poured their blood onto the plant, and waited for security to arrest them.

Afterwards, the Plowshares Eight’s statement read: “We wish also to challenge the lethal lie spun by G.E. through its motto, ‘We bring good things to life.’” As manufacturers of the Mark 12A reentry vehicle, G.E. actually prepares to bring good things to death.” My father and uncle—Phil Berrigan and Dan Berrigan—were part of that first action, and Phil went on to plan or participate in (or both) many more similar actions until his death in 2002.

Since the first, nearly 100 similarly inspired actions of symbolic disarmament and token transformation have occurred in the United States and Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Most such actions, and the ensuing trials, attract little more than local attention.

Transform Now Plowshares was different, garnering widespread publicity through above-the-fold coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and daily local news sources, as well as through congressional hearings on security lapses in Washington. Maybe it was the age and earnestness of the activists, or maybe it was the singularity of their feat—penetrating so deeply into such a secure facility—or maybe it was the political moment. But, whatever it was, Transform Now directed attention and forced the general public to question nuclear weapons like never before.

“Y-12 is a very secure facility. It is, and will always be, one of the most secure facilities in this country and in the world,” testified Ted Sherry, the senior federal manager at Y-12, at an earlier trial for peace activists. The action and the embarrassed, scrambling response from the National Nuclear Security Administration, shut down Y-12 for two weeks. It drew attention to lapses and deficiencies in security throughout the nuclear complex, which contracts with private military firms for hundreds of millions of dollars in base security.

“Y-12” doesn’t stand for anything. The facility was built to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and was a key component of the Manhattan Project. In the early 1940s, some people called it the “Mystery Plant” and others dubbed it the “Shangri-la Plant.” It was a massive undertaking. The federal government seized 60,000 acres of land, evicted 3,000 farmers and homesteaders, paved 200 miles of road and erected 44,000 houses. Once the complex was constructed, 75,000 people were brought in to operate it. High-school girls were told they’d be making ice cream and trained to turn knobs and flip switches perched in high stools. Men worked 70 hours a week, exhausted and stressed. But they didn’t talk about it. Ever. At its height, Y-12 was producing “several hundred grams of bomb-grade uranium per day” and eating up 14 percent of the nation’s electricity.

Zak vividly renders how, in this strange and isolated world, people worked hard every day while having no idea what they were doing. Prospective jurors for the Transform Now Ploughshares trial all had some connection to the Y-12 facility and very little knowledge of or curiosity about what their family members did there. As Oak Ridge Mayor Tom Beehan told Zak, “If you were to walk around in here right now and start talking to people about [nuclear bombs], you’d get blank stares.” The Transform Now activists hoped to shatter this pervasive silence, but the cone of secrecy endures to this day.

Since the end of the Cold War, Y-12 has morphed, however, the facility remains responsible for ensuring bomb components are ready to be deployed if needed. But, as Zak writes, “Oak Ridge’s nuclear legacy has been rebranded and diversified into a broader, vaguer mission,” which is costing taxpayers billions. It is now “Innovation Valley,” home to Titan, one of the world’s biggest and fastest supercomputers; the Everest visualization facility; the Spallation Neutron Source; and more high-tech, super sci-fi, next-edge sort of machines.

Around the time of the trial, a progressive Christian student confessed to Sister Megan: “I know nothing about the anti-nuclear movement. I was born in ’92, and it’s kind of an afterthought for my generation.” Fair enough. Millennials have their hands full with catastrophic climate change, crippling debt from name-brand educations that do not guarantee living wages or secure employment, the scourge of gun violence, the threat of terrorism, the muscular militarization of everyday life including policing, just to name a few. But to the Plowshares movement, all of these issues are built on the foundation of the bomb and its unique God-defying, creation-threatening destructive power. This tunnel vision and the ardent faith of the activists makes for a peculiar disconnect with mainstream society, which was on full display at the trial and sentencing of the three activists.

The three activists—all recidivists—were charged with “intent to injure, interfere with and obstruct the national defense of the United States” (which carries a 20-year sentence) as well as trespassing, destruction, and depredation of government property. They pleaded not guilty. Many of the exchanges during the trial were almost comical. While being cross-examined by prosecutor Melissa Kirby, Sister Megan Rice was able to steer the conversation to highlight the motivations behind the Plowshares’ actions:

“What do you think about what they do at Y-12?”

“I feel that they are making a huge amount of money. Of the people’s money.”

“Why does Y-12 need healing, forgiveness and the imminent empowerment that you spoke of a moment ago?”

“I think everyone can answer that question. As I say, it is manufacturing that which can only cause death.”

The more technical aspects of the trial put the jurors into a daze or full-on napping. Defense attorney Bill Quigley cross-examined Steven Erhart, the national nuclear-security administration manager for both Pantex and Y-12 nuclear facilities. Quigley asked, “Would you agree that there was a sense of complacency among the security personnel that has been changed as a result of this incursion?”

Erhart took issue with complacency, saying he believed “a better term would be ‘normalization of the deviation from the optimum.’” Zak writes that this turn of phrase drew scoffs from the audience and snores from the jury.

Brigadier General Rodney L. Johnson was tasked with leading the “recovery” after the break in (as though Y-12 was New Orleans after Katrina or Baton Rouge after this latest round of killing rains). In his testimony he tried to explain why the defendants were being billed $8,531.67 for repairs to the HEUMF when it was also basic work like mending the fences and painting over the graffiti.

Greg Boertje-Obed asked Johnson,

“I have a special interest, because I’m a house painter. It looks like you purchased 100 gallons of paint. Is that correct?”

“Yes, according to the receipt.”

“And do you know if there is any paint left over?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because it seems to me that’s quite excessive. So have you ever painted a room or hired somebody to paint a room in your house?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you recall about how much paint it took to cover one room?”

“No.”

“I can suggest that it takes about a gallon.”

“Objection, Your Honor.”

The jury found them guilty after a little more than two hours of deliberation. At sentencing, Sister Megan Rice said to Judge Amul Thapar: “Please have no leniency with me. To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest honor you could give me. Thank you. I hope it will happen.”

Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed were both sentenced to just over five years, and three years supervised release. Megan Rice was sentenced to two years and 11 months in prison. Judge Thapar said, “I know you want a life sentence and I just can’t accommodate that request. Not only am I confident that you will live long past any sentence I give you, but I am sure that you will continue to use that brilliant mind you have. I only hope you’ll use it to effectuate change in Washington rather than crimes in Tennessee.”

The three served about two years before a Cincinnati appeals court found that the government had mistaken motive for intent and overturned their convictions. They were released.

Dan Zak, a reporter for The Washington Post describes himself as “not a historian, physicist, lawyer, diplomat, activist, or beat reporter.” But his book creates the conditions for all of these people and beliefs and perspectives and expertizes to dialogue with one another in a way they cannot or do not in real life. He brings the reader to the Marshall Islands, which were torn apart, impoverished, poisoned, and made dependent by nuclear-weapons testing. Zak goes inside Vienna’s Hofburg Palace for the December 2014 Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, and inside the United Nations during the 2015 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He creates interplay between the committed but didactic disarmament activists and an arms-control community that is working incrementally toward verifiable reductions in nuclear-weapons stockpiles. Rose Gottemoeller, Obama’s lead negotiator for the START nuclear reductions with Russia, talks about how “there was no way to skip to a nuke-free world and forgo the hard work of responsible disposal, verification, and compliance. Peace and security couldn’t be summoned by snapping one’s fingers or agitating for immediate abolition. It was gradual. It was work.”

And, perhaps most intimately and importantly, he acquaints readers with the private nightmare of Kirk Garland, the security person who first encountered the three protesters early in the morning on July 28, 2012. Garland, who had worked in nuclear security for three decades and at Y-12 since 2007, drove up as Walli painted slogans. He did not pull his gun; he did not move to arrest the trespassers right away. He called for back up, and as he waited he listened to the litany and songs of Rice, Walli, and Boertje-Obed. Garland was fired a few weeks later, after being praised for his steady, measured response. He lost his health insurance and then was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—which could have stemmed from his exposure to toxic chemicals at other nuclear sites—and put on medication that cost $5,000 a month. At the tale’s end, Garland was working as a corrections officer and still confident that “God’s got something planned for us.”

Dan Zak’s book reminds readers that the United States’ long, tangled, poisonous, and very expensive nuclear-weapons odyssey is far from over. And it will need a lot more people not forgetting if the outcome is going to be ultimately hopeful.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-a-nun-a-vet-and-a-housepainter-stood-up-to-the-threat-of-nuclear-weapons/
Why Toy Guns Matterhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-toy-guns-matter/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganAug 1, 2016

It was a beautiful evening and the kids—Madeline, 2; Seamus, almost 4; and Rosena, 9—were running across a well-tended town green. Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and “pow-powed” them, calling out, “Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous.”

Madeline and Rosena laughed and just kept on running, with Seamus at their heels. I hid my face in my hands. It wasn’t just that he was playing guns, but that he was using a Pride flag as his gun at a vigil to mourn those killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. My pacifist husband Patrick ran to redirect their activities, replacing the flag with a ball and glove and beginning a game of catch. Vigil organizers were taking turns reading the names of those killed into a microphone.

“… Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Luis S. Vielma, 22…”

Those three men and 46 others were massacred on June 12. Another 50 people were wounded. Omar Mateen, who killed them, was armed with a Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle and a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He bought those two weapons legally in the days leading up to the attack.

The carnage brought politicians and pundits out in force, using all the usual arguments for and against guns. Because the victims were mostly gay and mostly Latino, and because the attack was carried out by an American citizen with an ethnic last name who may have been enthralled by Islamic terrorism, or a closeted, self-hating homosexual (or both), the commentary quickly became muddled. Was it a hate crime, Islamic terrorism, or a strange double-bonus hit for the haters? Mateen was killed in a shootout with police and so can’t speak to his motives. Investigators were left to sift through the material evidence and a dizzying compilation of online comments, Facebook likes, and recollections from old coworkers, family members, and possible lovers in their search for answers.

The most essential facts are, however, not that complicated: Mateen had a license to carry a gun, training as a private security guard, and hatreds to act upon. He armed himself and he killed.

And all over the country, since that fateful day that elicited the usual cries of “never again,” the killing continues: Alton Sterling and Philando Castille, by the police; Dallas Area Rapid Transit Police Officer Brent Thompson and four Dallas Police officers, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith, Michael Krol, and Patrick Zamarripa, by a lone sniper, Micah Johnson, who himself was then killed by an armed police robot; three more police officers in Baton Rouge on July 17.

“… Montrell Jackson, 32
Matthew Gerald, 41
Brad Garafola, 45…”

And the killing continues. Using the Gun Violence Archive, I counted another 306 deaths by guns throughout the United States in the first eight days of July alone. Most of them weren’t high-profile police shootings or mass tragedies, but in a small-scale and localized way, the grief and outrage of Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas were replicated in every corner of this country, including Ticfaw, Louisiana; Woodland, California; Tabernacle, New Jersey; and Harvey, Illinois. More than 300 deaths by gun in just eight days.

“Stabbin’ My Bunny”: Teaching Kids About Guns and Violence

And then, of course, there were my kids, my husband, and those “guns.” As a boy, Patrick wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns. Instead, he, his parents, and their friends would go to the mall during the Christmas buying spree to put “Stop War Toys” stickers on Rambo and G.I. Joe action figures. When he went to his friends’ houses, he had to tell them that war toys were verboten.

I grew up in a similar family of activists. We, too, were forbidden toy guns and other war toys. My brother and I were more likely to play games like “protester at the Pentagon” than cops and robbers. I’ve been thinking recently about why toy guns didn’t have a grip on our imaginations as kids. I suspect it was because we understood—were made to understand—what the big gun of US militarism had done in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indochina, and throughout Central America. Our dad had seen the big gun of war up close and personal. His finger—the same one he pointed at us when we were in trouble—had pulled the trigger again and again in France during World War II. He was decorated there, but had zero nostalgia for the experience. He was, in fact, deeply ashamed of the dashing figure he had once cut when home from the front. And so, Dad screwed up a new kind of courage to say no to war and violence, to killing of any kind. His knowledge of war imbued his nonviolent peace activist mission with a genuine, badass, superhero style swagger.

Our parents—our community of ragtag, countercultural Catholic peace activists—made that no-violence, no-killing, no-matter-what point again and again. In fact, my early experience of guns was the chilling fear of knowing that, in protest, my father, mother, and their friends were walking into what they called “free-fire zones” on military bases, where well-armed, well-trained soldiers were licensed to kill intruders. So we didn’t point toy guns at each other. We didn’t pow-pow with our fingers or sticks. We crossed those fingers and hoped that the people we loved would be safe.

Our inner city Baltimore neighborhood, where crack cocaine madness was just taking hold, drove that point home on a micro level. Our house was robbed at gunpoint more than once—and we had so little worth taking. We watched a man across the street bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in a fight over nothing. People from our house ran to help and were there for far too long before an ambulance even arrived. We knew as little kids that violence was no laughing matter, nor child’s play. It was serious business and was to be resisted.

As parents tend to do, Patrick and I are passing this tradition on to our kids, hopefully without the emotional scarring that went with our childhoods of resistance. They don’t have guns or action figures or any other toy implements of death. Still, we’ve been watching Seamus, our Team Elsa (from the Disney blockbuster Frozen) son, as he’s recently begun turning every stick into an imaginary gun. This is, of course, happening just as, in the headlines of the moment, actual guns are turning so many previously real people into statistics. Under the circumstances, how could I not find myself thinking about toy guns, real guns, the nature of play, the role of imagination, the place of parents, and how to (or whether to) police (ha!) that imaginary play?

When my stepdaughter Rosena was about four, she found a toy dagger at the playground, somehow smuggled it home, and was stabbing one of her beloved stuffed animals, a bunny, repeatedly with it.

In the other room, I could hear the thumps on the bedroom floor and called out, “What are you doing?”

“Stabbin’ my bunny. I kilt her,” she responded matter-of-factly.

Seizing a “teaching moment” and undoubtedly gripped by my own childhood experiences and memories of my parents, I blustered into the bedroom with a shoebox. “Now, your bunny is dead,” I announced in my version of over-the-top momism. “You know what happens when living things die, right? It’s forever, right? Now, we have to bury her.” Rosena and I then “buried” the doll on a high shelf in her closet. I told her that we cannot hurt or kill the things (or people) we love. I told her that, because she had “killed” that bunny, she could never play with it again.

About a week later, I slipped it back into her toy basket and, when she asked why, assured her that I thought she wouldn’t hurt her toys like that again. She agreed. I recall that episode now with a certain embarrassment, but when I recently heard Rosena explaining death and loss to her little brother and sister, I thought: Oh, maybe the drama of the shoebox burial was actually helpful in some fashion.

Toys matter. We’ve put a fair amount of thought into what might be called toy curation in our household. We’ve bought nothing new and little used. Mostly, we’ve accepted shipments of hand-me-downs from friends who just wanted “this crap” out of their houses. No guns came with them, thankfully. After all, even toy guns can mean death under the wrong circumstances.

A year ago, I visited the Cuddell Recreation Center in Cleveland with my daughter Madeline and a group of friends. That broad stretch of ball fields and paths, anchored by a gazebo and a playground, was where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann in November 2014. Rice, an African American, was playing with an Airsoft pellet gun that a friend’s dad had bought at Walmart. A replica of an actual Colt pistol, it shot plastic pellets and looked pretty real, since the orange tip signifying “toy” was missing. However, Officer Loehmann, investigating a report that a man was carrying a gun in the park, was moving too fast to notice much. He sped up and began shooting even before his squad car stopped moving. Rice’s hands were still reportedly in his pockets.

Though Loehmann was not indicted, the city of Cleveland paid a $6 million settlement to the Rice family and demolished the gazebo where the boy was shot. In the park that day, local activists described the shooting and its aftermath to our group. Half listening, I followed Madeline as she toddled into the playground. I tried to imagine Samaria Rice’s pain in this unremarkable place made part shrine, part soapbox by a police officer’s quick trigger finger, racism, and her son’s blood.

I thought about that toy gun in Tamir Rice’s hand and what might have been going through his head as he pointed it and played with it. Despite the age difference, it couldn’t have been that far from what regularly goes through my son’s head when he picks up a stick and points it: pop, boom, wow! The difference, of course, is that Seamus, blond and freckled and unmistakably white, would run little risk of being shot down by a policeman, even eight years from now with a replica toy gun in his hands.

Blasters, Blasters, Everywhere

Toys are a big business in this country, raking in $19.4 billion in 2015, according to the retail tracking firm NPD Group. Our family is not responsible for even a dime of this. Not surprisingly, then, my announcement that we were all going to spend a rainy afternoon at a local Toys “R” Us store came like a bolt from the blue for the kids.

I wanted to see what kind of toy weaponry was for sale there. I was curious, among other things, about whether the boys at school who had taught Seamus about superheroes, bad guys, and Star Wars had ignited in my son a love of weaponry; I was curious, that is, as to how he would react to the walls of guns I imagined Toys “R” Us displaying.

We got into our car as if it were Christmas Eve, Seamus beside himself with excitement, Madeline on a contact high from her brother. I was experiencing my own contact high, taking my kids on their first research trip.

What we found was not exactly what I expected—on many levels.

Seamus was quickly overwhelmed by the glut of everything—lots of pictures of toys on boxes, but not a lot to pick up. (It was, in that sense, the very opposite of our visits to the Goodwill store, where you can sit on the floor and play with all those second-hand toys as long as you put them back afterwards.) Not so surprisingly, in retrospect, he went straight for what was familiar, what he could grab in his hand and actually look at: the books. It took some effort to wrestle him away from Five Stories About Princesses and enlist him in my quest for bad toys. (Madeline had, by then, fallen asleep.)

I had finally found the Nerf “blasters,” but he wasn’t interested. “Let’s not go down this aisle, okay, Mom?”

I was, of course, looking for the worst of the worst when it came to weaponry, but it proved remarkably hard to find. The aisle did, admittedly, have the Nerf Zombie Strike Doominator and the Nerf Modulus Recon MKIIfor $34.99 each. Those certainly sounded grim, given the eternal war against the undead, but the bright orange, cartoonish, completely unrealistic “blasters” on display and marketed to kids “eight and up” seemed distant indeed from American gun carnage (and our wars in distant lands), nor was there anything on the packaging that even hinted at real people getting shot in real encounters or real wars. I must admit that I don’t like the idea of Seamus shooting anything at anyone—even a brain-hungry zombie—but as it turned out, I needn’t have worried, not this time around anyway. Zombie-killing wasn’t in his wheelhouse.

Still, I kept looking for the real gun aisle, and I did come across more blasters, dart shooters, and the like, none with the word “gun” on them. Of course, we do live in Connecticut, less than 100 miles from Newtown where, in 2012, Adam Lanza, a devotee of violent video games who grew up in a gun-filled house, killed 20 kids just a little older than Seamus along with six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. So maybe our local toy outlet was being sensitive, but I doubt it. There was the Halo UNSC SMG Blaster (the initials make it sound extra tough but stand for nothing) for $19.99, and the NERF Star Wars Episode VII First Order Stormtrooper Deluxe Blaster, which fires 12 darts up to 65 feet without reloading, for $41.99. The worst thing I could find was the Xploderz Mayhem, with “more distance, more ammo,” which shoots easy-to-wash off mini-water pellets. It was on clearance for $18.89.

By then, Seamus was pulling me frantically toward the aisle with the full Frozen franchise on display. Madeline was now awake and in heaven.

So I left them there briefly and snuck off to do a last check for “real” toy guns. No such luck. I didn’t find the kind of Airsoft gun Tamir Rice was playing with when he was killed. I didn’t find an ersatz Sig Sauer either.

It turns out that most brick-and-mortar toy stores don’t seem to offer realistic-looking toy weaponry anymore, nor is there the toy store equivalent of the curtained-off area in the old neighborhood video rental shop where the porn was available. For such toys, you have to turn to an online world of websites like Kids-Army.com, where you can indeed buy realistic-looking toy rifles, shotguns, and pistols, or even to Amazon, where you can find an Airsoft version of the Sig Sauer rifle for $249.99.

“Start Them Young”

The National Rifle Association (NRA) would undoubtedly have been disappointed by my local Toys “R” Us outlet—just as its officials undoubtedly are by the way most big toy merchants seem to have left their more realistic guns for the online world. This happened, in part, in response to the sort of social pressure that my husband engaged in when in high school and—more critically—the almost routine horror of the blurred line between toy guns and real ones. You know we’re a quirky, gun-crazy nation when Cleveland could ban toy guns and umbrellas with pointy tips from the area around the Republican Convention in the name of security, but couldn’t keep out the real guns in open-carry Ohio.

The NRA wants kids to play with realistic toy guns and BB guns, since they believe that such toys are part of a child’s initiation into the future ownership of perfectly real guns. At the moment, the gun lobby is concerned that not enough people have guns—even though the 270 million to 310 million of them already amassed around this country (according to the Pew Research Center) could arm just about every man, woman, transgendered person, and child around. Still, despite the fact that Americans can now carry guns in all 50 states and the NRA continues to win most of the big political fights, the number of households with guns is actually down from its peak in the late 1960s (though those that are armed have more and deadlier weapons than ever before). No wonder the gun industry and the gun lobby are fighting to produce an army of toddlers.

Start Them Young,” a February 2016 report from the Violence Policy Center, details how gun manufacturers and the NRA are eager to market real guns to younger and younger consumers. The report starts with a selection of quotes from the industry, including this gem from Craig Cushman, marketing director for Thompson/Center Arms, about their Hot Shot rifle for kids: “[We’re] talking about a tiny gun intended for the very youngest shooters—the ultimate first gun. We’re targeting the six- to 12-year-old range.” In other words, kids are literally in their sights.

It’s a strange world we live in. The toy industry has puffed up and candy-colored its play guns, turned up the volume on the violence online and in video games, and wrapped everything in plastic and safety warnings. At the same time, the gun industry is making its guns smaller and cuter for kids, while putting its energy into the all-important junior market.

Can we be safe—any of us—in a nation awash in guns? The gun-and-ammo industry boasted $16 billion in revenue for 2015. Gun stores—from brick-and-mortar shops to online retailers—had $3.1 billion in revenue that same year. The industry as a whole claimed responsibility for nearly $50 billion in “economic activity” in 2015 alone. That represents a fair number of jobs, but here is the number that really goes boom: $229 billion. That’s the annual cost of fatal and non-fatal gun violence in this country, according to Mother Jones and analyst Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, who teamed up to crunch the numbers. That figure includes both the direct costs of gun injuries and deaths—police investigations, emergency personnel, hospital bills, long-term care for the injured, funeral expenses for the dead, and the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning the perpetrators. As the report concludes: “Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence… the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.”

We are awash in guns. Where does it end? Gun violence is embedded in our national mythology, our foreign policy, our notions of masculinity, our entertainment industry, and our children’s play. We see violence solving problems on every screen—from the zombie apocalypse to the rise of ISIS. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s maxim still applies: “One should not put a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Sooner or later, that rifle is sure to go off. It might be an accident; it might be terrorism; it might be hate. But it will go off. Somewhere, as you read this, it’s going off right now.

I don’t want to police my kids’ imagination. And there is a whole strain of parenting literature that assures me that I don’t have to. It says don’t interfere with your kid’s play, even if it includes guns and shooting and killing. Imagination is imagination and the violence isn’t real. It might even, so this line of thinking goes, be a healthy way for them to process feelings of aggression.

I get what they’re saying, but it seems like a cop-out to me. To my mind, nonintervention is often a missed opportunity to be a parent. Sure, the violence isn’t real. The pow-pows don’t actually rip skin and tendon or stop hearts from beating, but the United States, which has been fighting distant wars nonstop for 15 years now, does have a violence problem and a man problem and a gun problem.

We know where that problem ends, but it starts somewhere, too. One place to begin to look, at least, is at how our kids—particularly our boys—play, and how they are nurtured (or not), and taught to express their emotions (or not). It is, at least in part, up to us, their parents, to decide whether they are going to be the ones who help repair our society and reorient us (or not). And it begins with the kinds of care and love they receive, the kinds of conversations they are invited into, the kinds of expectations they are given about behavior and relationships.

I don’t want to raise Seamus, Madeline, or Rosena in the austere, ripped from the headlines of horror, polemical atmosphere that was the essence of my own childhood. But I don’t want them to get comfortable with killing either.

I want so much more for, and from, my little boy than “Pow, pow, yous are dead now!” And that starts with taking the gun or the stick or the rainbow flag out of his hands, sitting him down, and having a hard conversation about what guns actually do to people—and how much killing hurts us all.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-toy-guns-matter/
Explaining Donald Trump to My Childrenhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/explaining-donald-trump-to-my-children/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganApr 12, 2016

So far, I’ve dealt with Donald Trump’s bid for the White House as performance art: a clever, full-body, self-marketing scheme in the fashion of actor Joaquin Phoenix restyling himself as a hip-hop artist to promote his mockumentary I’m Still Here. You remember that odd media moment from a few years back, right? When the handsome star of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line grew a huge beard and rapped incoherently on David Letterman? I can’t be the only one, can I?

So I keep waiting for the Trump-presidential-run punch line. I mean, what is his endless campaign that’s conquered America’s and even the world’s attention 24/7 really selling: the new Trumptopian private community on the moon (or in Burma)?

Still, after all these months—can it truly be nearly a year and not an eon or two?—I guess I finally have to accept that he’s really running for president and I have to figure out how to explain Donald Trump to my kids. At 9, 3, and 2, they may be the only Americans left who aren’t in the know when it comes to The Donald—and, believe me, I have no illusions. This is going to be tough! After all, he makes me scream at the screen, which leads my kids to wonder not about him but about their mom. It goes without saying (which is undoubtedly why I’m saying it) that he’s the antithesis of everything I believe in. Why are you not surprised by this? I’m way left of Bernie Sanders. I don’t usually admit it in public, but I’m probably going to vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. She talks about deep system change and a human-centered economy, and that’s the kind of talk I like.

Please note that, in good mom fashion, so far I’ve used only “I statements” and I’m always polite (when not screaming at that screen). Come to think of it, I pretty much only argue about politics with other people who read The New York Times with a highlighter in one hand, their indignation in reserve, and a pad of paper ready to make notes for their next rational (yet withering) letter to the editor that won’t be published.

So, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump pushes all my buttons, even a few I hadn’t noticed that I had, which is why I’ve tried to relegate him to the National Enquirer end of the media-political spectrum. But now that the Enquirer is breaking stories of “political import” in the era of The Donald and he’s even more of a household name than ever, it’s time to reconcile with reality. It’s time to accept that, even though (or do I mean because?) he’s racist and sexist, blustering and entitled, full of lies and blames and hates, he’s a Republican presidential candidate of consequence. I know, I know—I’m the last person in the United States to do this, but bear with me.

And even if he doesn’t win (please, God, yes!), who can deny that this election says something sad, troubling, and important, if not—in the Trumpian tradition—unbearably self-important, about our country? I imagine a President Trump and I immediately want to move my whole family to the other side of his big, fat, future “beautiful” wall on the border with Mexico.

All of this means that maybe trying to explain the Donald Phenomenon to my kids is a lost cause from the start. I’ll just get screechy and irrational and 9-year-old Rosena will go into preteen mode and roll her eyes, while 3-year-old Seamus will say: “Mom, why are you pullin’ on your hair and cryin’?” As I’m reading about Trump, however—and like all Americans these days, to read is to Trump and to view is to Trump, so I’m totally Trumped—I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I have the whole thing upside down. It’s not that I should teach my kids about him, but that my kids could teach him a thing or two about how to be a good person. They could make him great again! Maybe what we need to do is take Donald Trump back to Toddler Town.

“Mine” Is a Chilling Word

“Mine, Madeline! It’s mine.” The kids are both pulling on Olaf’s arms. The tiny, hug-loving snowman from Frozen is stretched between them, and Seamus is technically correct: Olaf was a Christmas present from his big sister Rosena. I am, however, trying to teach them the concept of “ours” and sharing and taking turns as well. If it isn’t something they can share—like books—they can at least trade off, so that both Seamus and his younger sister have a chance to enjoy the object of affection exclusively for a few minutes.

The objects in our house—except for the high-tech, expensive, and dangerous ones (which are mine)—belong to all of us and should be used and enjoyed responsibly by all of us. That’s how we officially operate. My mother, an activist in her own right, always told my brother, sister, and me that “mine is a chilling word.” Isn’t that a great line? I don’t use it a lot, because the kids get sidetracked by whatchilling means.

It’s no surprise that they are only partway there in moments that really matter like that dispute over Olaf, but Seamus is savvy enough to recognize that deploying the word “ours” when Madeline (the house baby at 2) says “mine” is a good way of getting my attention and some kind of interventionary help against his little sister. Madeline just learned the word “everybody’s,” as in, “This ball is everybody’s.” It’s mighty cute, even if it does sometimes still stand in for “mine.” And we keep trying.

Trump obviously stopped trying a long time ago, or was never taught to begin with. He has a “mine” problem. Maybe it’s because he was brought up with a silver knife in his mouth. Maybe his father told him, “You are a king,” and taught him to be a “killer” in childhood, business, and life. Who knows? His father is the “Old Man Trump,” the grim landlord that folk troubadour Woody Guthrie wrote and sang about (after signing a lease for one of his apartments): “I suppose/ Old Man Trump knows/ Just how much/ Racial hate/ He stirred up/ In the bloodpot of human hearts.” (In the 1970s, young Donald Trump and his family were compelled to provide the New York Urban League with a listing of every open apartment in their vast New York City holdings of 14,000 apartments after being sued for racial discrimination by the Justice Department.)

As a kid, Trump was sent off to military school, which he memorably claimed was harder than real military service. In assessing himself in the best possible light (something he’s never stopped doing quite publicly in these last months, giving the world a unique lesson in self-love), he told biographer Michael D’Antonio with pride (I think), “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

In a way, don’t you think that sums up the problem on hand? America First! Make America Great Again! Me! Mine! Build the Wall! Keep Out the Muslims! Aren’t these the grown-up equivalent of first-grade slogans and sentiments? Maybe Trump never got to be a real toddler and so did not grow into a real man (no matter what he thinks of his “hands”).

After all, real toddlers play. If their parents aren’t helicoptering in too much, they run headlong into the world with joyous abandon. And every scrape and bump teaches them a lesson not just about their capabilities, but about their limitations, all our limitations. They’re always reaching, always trying, always pushing themselves forward. From this play and the interactions and striving that comes with it they learn about natural consequences, including such simple lessons as be nice to others and they’re likely to be nice to you, share with others and they’re likely to do the same. Here, for instance, is a simple lesson of everyday life that doesn’t need to be taught: holding on tight to a ball is not as much fun as playing catch. (But if you never learn to let go to begin with…?)

I love watching my kids on the playground and work hard not to helicopter in or—the opposite effect that adds up to more or less the same thing—disappear into my phone or the crossword puzzle. And what amazes me is that they’re so outgoing and ready to connect with anyone who comes along.

“What’s your name?” Seamus greets each new kid. “Wanna play pirates?”—or lions, or wolves, or princesses, depending on his mood. And then he races off, confident that the other kid is running alongside him, ready to play. Madeline laughs and climbs to the top of the highest thing she can scale. “No help, mama. No help. Me do it!!” she calls, proudly, 10 feet off the ground. “Me big.”

And it’s true, she is Huge, so much bigger than Trump because she and Seamus don’t have that overwhelming urge to build walls, or call others names, or demean or demonize.

Listening is an Act of Love (Pay Attention, Donald!)

I almost feel sorry for Trump, given what I know of his upbringing. He pulls on my heartstrings a little, because a man so programmed to grab for every headline and steal every show and say whatever he can to keep the hot lights of the media on him undoubtedly wasn’t listened to as a kid.

Listening is an act of love; that’s what I tell my own kids (even though the steely-saucy New Yorker still buried in this 42-year-old mother of toddlers rolls her eyes big time every time I say it). If listening is an act of love, then it’s a good bet that long ago Donald Trump lost out big time.

Our children’s librarian told me that it takes a toddler five seconds to hear, absorb, and respond to a question or direction you give them. Five seconds is a long time in Toddler Town. In those seconds, I try to imagine my words working their way through a labyrinth of puzzles and curiosities as they hone in on the mental heartlands of my children. But here’s the question I ask myself: Why do I think of Trump while waiting for my “wash your hands” directive to radio down to my child’s brain? Why do I feel terrible for him? Maybe because the volume and pitch of his bombast exists in direct correlation to some ancient childhood feeling of wanting to be heard by those giants looming over him and not knowing how to make that happen.

We Have Nothing to Fear but…

Kids are scared of all sorts of things. Seamus and Madeline are afraid of the dark, of monsters, of superheroes gone bad, and—most of all—kale salad. (Their big sister Rosena harbors this particular dread, too.) Their fears are, of course, largely imaginary (kale salad aside). So try explaining the very real terror pressing at the heart of the Republican Party establishment now that their punishing no-government-is-good-government credo (except when it comes to our giant military and the most oppressive powers of the national security state, those giant tax breaks for the rich, and those giant prisons for the poor, black, and brown) has taken root in the ultimate anti-candidate, the bad boy with the world’s most talked about hairdo (the blonde bouffant with its own Twitter handle— “I’m on top of the man who is on top of the world. Follow me, people”).

Trump’s loss in Wisconsin may be good news for Republicans terrified of him and his family moving into the White House. In a recent poll, a third of Wisconsin Republicans said that they were scared of what Trump would do as president. (Many of them assumedly voted for Ted Cruz, a man so preternaturally scary that even the King of Scary—Stephen King—is scared of him, and that is scary!)

Fear is an evolutionary tool embedded in our minds to keep our bodies from doing dangerous and reckless things. How do toddlers conquer their fears, real and imaginary? Fear slows down their minds a little, taps into their inner executive, and helps them do a cost-benefit analysis of the risky behavior they’re considering. Then they screw up their courage, rush into the dark room, flip on the light, and grab the cookies, their little hearts beating like conga drums. The Fear of Trump should serve a similar function for Republicans. The problem is: Ted Cruz is not a cookie!

Toddlers have so much to teach Donald Trump as a person and as a presidential candidate, but deep down I don’t want him to learn such Toddler Town lessons because that just might make him implosion proof and canny enough to sweep into the Republican convention, get that nomination, and take the general election.

And then I would have a motherly problem of the first order: how to explain President Trump to Rosena, Seamus, and Madeline!



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/explaining-donald-trump-to-my-children/
When Your 3-Year-Old Son Asks, ‘Are They Going to Kill Me?’https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/when-your-3-year-old-son-asks-are-they-going-to-kill-me/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganDec 22, 2015

“What did you do at school today, Seamus?” It’s a question I ask him everyday.

“Well,” my proud preschooler begins, “we did not have a lockdown drill today.” And that’s about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling. Sometimes I’ll get something about “bim” (gym) or how “Bambi” (Jeremy) pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious 3-year-old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he and his classmates had in their first month of school.

At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a fuller picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began, she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the library. Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet. Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.

“Does he talk about it at home?” she asks.

“It’s as though nothing else happens at school,” my husband replies. “He talks about lockdown drills all the time.”

She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus remains easily startled long after they’re over, running for shelter between an adult’s legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.

At that moment—not exactly one of my proudest—I burst into tears. I just couldn’t square my son’s loving exuberance and confidence in the people around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by an armed killer through the halls of the Friendship School. How, after all, do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject that’s been on my mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost 2, and Rosena, almost 9, so proud to share his classroom with them.

“At home,” I tell the teacher through my tears, “we chant ‘Gun Control, Not Lockdown Drills!’ whenever he talks about them.” And then I add, “It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldn’t have to practice surviving a mass-killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole wide world.” I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.

Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!

His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her cheerful classroom. “I am sorry,” I finally say.

“No, no, it’s okay,” she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher learns. “It is hard,” she continues, “but this is real. We have to practice for this kind of thing.”

Thinking the Unthinkable

I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears—not quite irrational but blown out of all proportion—that have been woven into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents’ generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing “duck and cover” drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.

I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of friends and fellow travelers. We would stand in front of the Pentagon—this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s—holding up signs with slogans like “You can’t hide from a nuclear bomb” and the old symbol for a fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to be safe was to get rid of them.

Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared, while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamus’s generation? And what about our present set of fears? What about our 21st-century whys?

Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are), that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to cling to this “God-given, constitutionally enshrined right,” my son does need to endure more lockdown drills.

The consensus of school-security experts is certainly that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn’t been practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14, 2012.

But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to me? When it makes no sense, period?

Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question. My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved me in a UNICEF slideshow about world hunger. We would go to churches and schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly, largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slideshow that lay the blame squarely on the US military-industrial complex.

My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always ask, “Why no TV?” and always get the same answer. “Because it teaches racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants, because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity.”

So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black-and-white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room wall. I couldn’t tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young brain by the age of 5. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists. Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.

I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsDoomsday Clock—these are not things that I want to pass on to the next generation. I guess I’m happy that they don’t know what nuclear weapons are (yet), and it’s one more thing I’m not looking forward to explaining to them.

The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are only going to multiply. We have to try—I have to try—to answer them as best we—I—can. It’s a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of this world of ours, and it’s a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain the hard stuff? But if we don’t, others surely will. In these early years, our kids turn to us first, but if we can’t or won’t answer their questions, how long will they keep asking them?

Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?

“Why Do the Police Kill People?”

At some preschools, it’s protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?

Somehow, and I can’t tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth. At Seamus’s school, they don’t talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and “keeping safe from a threat” by “hiding” in it.

In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events—San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code over granola and yogurt. It’s as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.

Still, it’s strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantánamo and climate change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).

After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus’s questions. “Why do the police kill people?” followed, of course, by “Are they going to kill me?” Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a 3-year-old and how the very things that we encouraged in him—curiosity, openness, questioning authority—were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.

And then, of course, came the next inevitable “Why?” (the same one I’m sure we’ll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible—for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well—when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn’t need to cry every time he sees a police officer.

And then came the next “Why?” and who wouldn’t think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, “Because it’s nuts! And we’re nuts!” I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: “Don’t worry, you’re white!”

And then, of course, there’s the anxiety I have about how he’ll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom—the ridiculous game of “telephone” that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.

My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened. For 5- and 6-year-olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation, nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didn’t get enough information to formulate a why.

Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No news, sit tight, and pretend nothing’s going on. After all, like so many of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don’t exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three years ago doesn’t mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically under attack, yes?

Unlike so many people on this planet, we don’t live in a war zone (if you put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car any day of the week, right?

Of course, there’s another problem lurking here and it’s mine. I’m not there. My 3-year-old son is having scary experiences and I’m not there to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are preparing him for. They couldn’t be creepier. They’re a reminder not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

Some Questions Are Easier Than Others

Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever, because they get sick and their bodies get old and their organs don’t work any more and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.

The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy Googling and good sense—or any sense we may have of the goodness of humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best we can in this truly confusing world.

And keep one thing in mind: The very same litany of questions our kids never stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as well, largely unanswered.

Why this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?

Why? Why? Why?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/when-your-3-year-old-son-asks-are-they-going-to-kill-me/
The Art of Parenting on a Disappearing Planethttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-art-of-parenting-on-a-disappearing-planet/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganOct 6, 2015

Madeline is in the swing, her face the picture of delight. “Mo, mo,” she cries and kicks her legs to show me that she wants me to push her higher and faster. I push, and push, and push with both hands. There is no thought in my head except for her joy. I’m completely present in this moment. It’s perfection. Madeline embodies the eternal now and she carries me with her, pulling me out of my worries and fears and plans.

But not forever: After a few minutes, my mind and eyes wander. I take in the whole busy playground, crowded with toddlers plunging headlong into adventure and their attendant adults shouting exhortations to be careful, offering snacks, or lost in the tiny offices they carry in their hands. It’s a gorgeous day. Sunny and blue and not too hot, a hint of fall in the breeze. And then my eye is caught by a much younger mom across the playground trying to convince her toddler that it’s time to go.

When Madeline graduates from high school, I will be 57. Jeez, I think, that mom will still be younger than I am now when her kid walks across that stage. If I live to be 85, Madeline will be 46 and maybe by then I’ll have some grandkids. In fact, I’m suddenly convinced of it. Between Madeline and her three-year-old brother Seamus and their 8-year-old sister Rosena, I will definitely live to see grandkids. I reassure myself for the millionth time that having kids in my late 30s was totally fine.

And then another thought comes to mind, the sort of thought that haunts the parents of this moment: When I’m 85, it will be 2059, and what will that look like? When my grandkids are my age now, it could be almost a new century. And what will our planet look like then? And I feel that little chill that must be increasingly commonplace among other parents of 2015.

And then I’m gone. You wouldn’t know it to look at me. After all, I’m still pushing the swing, still cooing and chatting with my buoyant 18-month-old daughter, but my mind is racing, my heart is pounding. This playground will not be here. This tranquil, stable, forever place wasn’t built to last 100 years, not on a planet like this one at this moment anyway.

I look around and I know. None of this—the municipal complex, the school across the street, the supermarket up the road—is built for 100 years, especially not this hundred years. It won’t last. And I can’t imagine a better future version of this either. What comes to mind instead are apocalyptic images, cheesy ones cribbed from The Walking Dead, that zombie series on AMC; The Day After, a 1980s made-for-TV dramatization of a nuclear attack on the United States; Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel The Road; Brad Pitt’s grim but ultimately hopeful World War Z; and The Water Knife, a novel set in the western United States in an almost waterless near future.

They all rush into my head and bump up against the grainy black-and-white documentary footage of Hiroshima in 1945 that I saw way too young and will never forget. This place, this playground, empty, rusted, submerged in water, burned beyond recognition, covered in vines, overrun by trees. Empty. Gone.

Then, of course, Madeline brings me back to our glorious present. She wants to get out of the swing and hit the slides. She’s fearless, emphatic, and purposeful. She deserves a future. Her small body goes up those steps and down the slide over and over and over again. And the rush of that slide is new every time. She shouts and laughs at the bottom and races to do it again. Now. Again. Now. This is reality. But my fears are real, too. The future is terrifying. To have a child is to plant a flag in the future and that is no small responsibility.

We Have Nothing to Fear But…

We mothers hear a lot these days about how to protect our children. We hear dos and don’ts from mommy magazines, from our own mothers, our pediatricians, each other, from lactation experts and the baby formula industry, from the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, from Doctor Bob Sears, from sociologists and psychiatrists and child development specialists. We are afraid for our kids who need to be protected from a world of dangers, including strangers, bumblebees, and electrical outlets.

Such threats are discussed, dissected, and deconstructed constantly in the media and ever-newer ones are raised, fears you never even thought about until the nightly news or some other media outlet brought them up. But hanging over all these humdrum, everyday worries is a far bigger fear that we never talk about and that you won’t read about in that mommy magazine or see in any advice column. And yet, it’s right there, staring us in the face every single day, constant, existential, too big to name.

We can’t say it, but we are increasingly afraid of the future, of tomorrow, afraid for our children in ways that, in themselves, are frightening to bring up. It’s as diffuse as “anything can happen” and as specific as we are running out of ______ [fill in the blank: clean water, fossil fuels, space for people, arable land, cheap food stuffs, you name it]. Even if the supply of whatever you chose to think about isn’t yet dwindling in our world, you know that it will one of these days. Whatever it is, that necessity of everyday life will be gone (or too expensive for ordinary people) by ______ [2020, 2057, 2106].

It’s paralyzing to look at Madeline and think such thoughts, to imagine an ever-hotter planet, ever-less comfortable as a home not just for that vague construct “humanity,” but for my three very specific children, not to speak of those grandchildren of my dreams and fantasies.

It’s something that’s so natural to push away. Who wouldn’t prefer not to think about it? And at least here, in our world, on some level we can still do that.

For those of us who are white and Western and relatively financially stable, it’s still possible to believe we’re insulated from disaster—or almost possible anyway. We can hold on to the comfort that our children are unlikely to be gunned down or beaten to death by police, for example. We can watch the news and feel sadness for the mass exodus out of Syria and all those who are dying along the way, but those feelings are tinged with relief in knowing that we will not be refugees ourselves.

But for how long? What if?

They say: enjoy your kids while they’re young; pretty soon they’ll be teenagers. Haha, right? Actually, I’m excited about each stage of my kids’ lives, but Madeline won’t be a teenager until 2027. According to climate scientists and environmentalists, that may already be “past the point of no return.” If warming continues without a major shift, there will be no refreezing those melting ice shelves, no holding back the rising seas, no scrubbing smog-clogged air, no button we can press to bring water back to parched landscapes.

These are things I know. This is a future I, unfortunately, can imagine. These are the reasons I try to do all the right things: walk, eat mostly vegetarian, grow some of our own food, conserve, reuse, reduce, recycle. We had solar panels installed on our roof. We only have one car. We’re trying, but I know just as well that such lifestyle choices can’t turn this around.

It will take everyone doing such things—and far more than that. It will require governments to come to their senses and oil companies to restrain the urge to get every last drop of fossil fuel out of the ground. It will take what Naomi Klein calls a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.” In her groundbreaking and hopeful book, This Changes Everything, she writes,

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale [than the New Deal]. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.

Which brings me to fear and how it paralyzes. I don’t want to be paralyzed in the face of catastrophic climate change or any other looming calamity. I want to be motivated and spurred to action not by an apocalyptic vision of our local playground engulfed in flames or submerged under several feet of water, but by the potential for the brighter future than is surely within our grasp—within my grasp today and Madeline’s in some future that she truly deserves.

Preparing for the Unthinkable

Growing up, I heard this a lot: “Don’t be so First World, Frida.”

That’s what Phil Berrigan—former priest, brazenly nonviolent activist, tireless organizer for peace and justice—would tell me, his eldest daughter. If I was flippant or tweenish, that’s what he would always say. “Don’t be so First World.” It was his rejoinder when I asked for spending money or permission to go to the movies. What he meant was: Regulate your wants, consider others, be comfortable being alone, put yourself second, listen, be in solidarity, choose the harder path.

My father’s admonishment sounds a discordant note amid today’s morass of parenting messages with their emphasis on success and ease and happiness. But it prepared me for much of what I encountered along the road to adulthood and it resonates deeply as I parent three children whose futures I cannot imagine. Not really. Will they have clean water, a home, a democracy, a playground for their children? Will they be able to buy food—or even grow it? Will they be able to afford transportation? I don’t know.

What I can do is prepare them to distinguish needs from wants, to share generously and build community, to stand up for what they believe and not stand by while others are abused. When, as with Madeline at that playground, the unspoken overwhelms me, I wonder whether I shouldn’t sooner or later start teaching them how the world works and basic skills that will serve them well in an uncertain future: what electricity is and how to start a fire, how to navigate by the stars, how to feed themselves by hunting and gathering, how to build a shelter or find and purify water, or construct a bicycle out of parts they come across on the road to perdition.

The only problem is that, like most of my peers and friends, I actually don’t know how to do any of that (except maybe for the bicycle building), so I better get started. I should also be planting nut trees in our backyard and working for global nuclear disarmament. I can help New London (a water’s-edge community) be prepared and more resilient in the face of rising sea levels and be active in our local Green Party.

I know that there’s no simple solution, no easy or individual fix to what’s coming down the road. I know as well that there is no future except the one we are making right now, this second, again and again and again. And in our world, I call that hope, not despair. Perhaps you could just as easily call it folly. Call it what you will. I don’t have a label for my parenting style. I’m not a helicopter mom or a tiger mom. But like a lot of other people right now, whether they know it or not, realize it or not, I am parenting on the brink of catastrophe. I’m terrified for my children, but I am not paralyzed and I know I am not alone, which makes me, despite everything, hopeful, not for myself, but for Madeline.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-art-of-parenting-on-a-disappearing-planet/
Uncle Pentagon: Growing Up in the Shadow of the American War Statehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/uncle-pentagon-growing-shadow-american-war-state/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganMar 10, 2015For the daughter of two radical pacifists, antiwar advocacy runs in the family.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The Pentagon loomed so large in my childhood that it could have been another member of my family. Maybe a menacing uncle who doled out put-downs and whacks to teach us lessons or a rich, dismissive great-aunt intent on propriety and good manners.

Whatever the case, our holidays were built around visits to the Pentagon’s massive grounds. That’s where we went for Easter, Christmas, even summer vacation (to commemorate the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). When we were little, my brother and sister and I would cry with terror and dread as we first glimpsed the building from the bridge across the Potomac River. To us, it pulsated with malice as if it came with an ominous, beat-driven soundtrack out of Star Wars.

I grew up in Baltimore at Jonah House, a radical Christian community of people committed to nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear culture. It was founded by my parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister. They gained international renown as pacifist peace activists not afraid to damage property or face long prison terms. The Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Plowshares Eight, the Griffiss Seven: these were anti–Vietnam War or antinuclear actions they helped plan, took part in and often enough went to jail for. These were also creative conspiracies meant to raise large questions about our personal responsibility for, and the role of conscience in, our world. In addition, they were explorations of how to be effective and nonviolent in opposition to the war state. These actions drew plenty of media attention and crowds of supporters, but in between we always went back to the Pentagon.

As kids, horrific images of war were seared into our brains from old documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and newer dispatches from Vietnam, and later El Salvador and Guatemala. And all of them seemed traceable to that one place, that imposing five-sided building overlooking the Potomac and surrounded by parking lots and sylvan acres of lawns and paths.

Burning Hair and Baby Bottles Filled With Blood

In many ways, I grew up at the Pentagon. Our family never sat for a formal portrait. We didn’t take snapshots at parties or picnics or on vacation. But what we do have is photo albums stuffed with pictures taken at the Pentagon as we protested there year after year after year.

In one of my favorite photos of myself as a toddler, I’m marching down the Pentagon parade ground, holding a bottle of milk in one hand and tightly grasping the hand of my favorite grown-up, Rosemary Maguire, with the other. The pillars of the River Entrance are behind me. Best guess: it’s 1976. My brother Jerry relaxes in a stroller in the background. My mom and other friends are standing nearby. We could be anywhere, but of course we’re not. We’re at the Pentagon and our protest is either just over or about to begin.


Frida and Rosemary Maguire at the Pentagon in 1976. Frida’s mom, Liz McAlister, and brother Jerry can be seen in the background.

When President Gerald Ford requested a post-Vietnam Pentagon budget of $105 billion for 1976, he was asking for an increase of 15 percent in military spending. American nuclear capabilities, already vast, were to be built up yet more, while conventional non-nuclear forces were to be expanded, too. After debate on the Hill, however, Congress cut his increase in half.

These were overwhelming sums to the adults protesting back then. And yet, even after adjusting for inflation, they seem almost modest today. Nearly thirty years later, President Barack Obama is requesting $534 billion for the Pentagon and another $50.9 billion for ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And this doesn’t even include the more than $12 billion for maintaining and bolstering US nuclear forces, most of which is tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget at a moment when Washington is committing itself to a trillion-dollar, multi-decade upgrade of those forces.

A snapshot eight or nine years later shows me crouched behind my little sister, then an irresistibly cute toddler of 2 or 3. I’m helping her hand out leaflets to Pentagon employees as they come to work. A woman takes a flyer from her, while grown-up friends hold a banner that reads “Faithfulness to the Covenant Means Disarmament.”

Our house was full of such banners, painted in block letters on sheets. The year might have been 1983 and the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists then stood at three minutes to nuclear midnight. Caspar Weinberger was secretary of defense; the Pentagon was, of course, his office; and he had already earned the moniker “Cap the Ladle” for his efforts to increase spending on nuclear weapons like the MX missile and President Ronald Reagan’s futuristic “Star Wars” anti-missile defense weapons fantasy.

In the picture, I’m in a jean jacket that I loved to rags and wore regardless of the weather, and a regrettable headband with a floppy bow. The Pentagon workers would undoubtedly have refused flyers from me, but they took them with a smile from my little sister. They probably didn’t read them, but getting those tracts into their hands seemed like some measure of success.

When I was 8, seventy-five people from our community were arrested blockading the entrances to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, a few people towed a broken-down station wagon onto its parade ground, disabled it completely and left it there with “LAST RESORT” spray-painted on its side in big block letters. “Auto workers are sleeping in their cars in Houston,” John Shields, one of the protest leaders, told UPI, “We are making the connection between homelessness and the lack of jobs because of the mad buildup of the arms race.”

In another photo, taken in April 1985, I walk down the River Entrance steps. I am 11 and soaking wet and grimacing. I still remember the moment. I’m hoarse from chanting, “You can’t wash the blood away!” as a maintenance crew works to scrub down one of the Pentagon’s imposing pillars. They could and did wash the blood away. Their hoses are visible in the background and the pillars are clean. Drawn from the veins of my parents and their friends, the dark red liquid was a potent symbol meant to mark that building with the end result of war. My parents hoped that it would remind those entering of the reality of their work, of what lay behind or beyond the clean offices they labored in and the spiffy suits or uniforms they wore. At the time, the Pentagon was locked in a fierce fight with the CIA and the White House over the wisdom of trading weapons for hostages with Iran and giving the money to US-backed mercenaries in Nicaragua who were fighting a bloody war against peasants, catechists and communists who wanted land reform, education and democracy.


Frida and a friend in front of the River Entrance in April 1985, wet from the hoses used to clean off the blood.

Thrown from baby bottles, splattered high onto porous white marble, the blood was hard to wash off. The maintenance guys worked around us as much as possible. They tried not to get us wet. Occasionally, the police would move us out of the way, only to watch us scamper back through the suds and pools of pinkish water.

Sandblasting, power-washing, scraping: it was all tried to get those stains out. Over the years, the columns wore away perceptibly and by that modest measure we marked our success. We were changing the Pentagon, molecule by molecule. It was hard work, but maybe easier than changing the hearts and minds of the men and women who walked through those pools of blood, tracking it onto that building’s highly polished floors.

All those years protesting at the “War Department”—my parents liked to use the old World War II–era name for it—so many hours spent pleading, haranguing, imploring, condemning, appealing and confronting and, not surprisingly, a stilted decorum developed around our acts. Ah yes, you again, it must be Hiroshima Day.

We were the reminder, the tweak of conscience, the minor cost of doing business. They abhorred us but also tolerated us; they welcomed us as a foil or a challenge. Sometimes, it seemed like a little of all three at once. Looking back now, it’s kind of incredible that “they” let us be there, year after year. Maybe they appreciated our creativity. One thing was for sure: we knew how to make a spectacle.

In the late 1980s, a group of women cut off all their hair and burned it on the Pentagon steps. Wrapped in burlap sacks, they then keened in mourning for the victims of war—and let me assure you that burning hair does smell like death, like war, like terror. It may be the most awful smell in the world.

At the time, I was a young teenager in love with my long hair and I held onto it tightly as women I admired cut theirs off. (My mother’s hair was already too short to hack away dramatically.) Later, I felt their bare heads in wonder and laughed as one of them tried to lessen or at least neaten the damage with a small pair of scissors and a comb. The stench of their witness lodged in the back of my throat and clung to my jacket for the rest of the winter. This is the smell of the Pentagon, I would tell myself whenever I wanted to toss my coat in the washer. It’s good to remember.

In the early hours of one morning during the brief and devastating first Gulf War of 1991—who today even remembers “the highway of death”?—we blocked the roads leading to the Pentagon with huge piles of broken concrete and rebar. A handful of people with banners stood marking the piles as the “rubble of Baghdad.” The police arrested them, but could hold no one because they had no witnesses to the dumping of all that material. One officer even told my mom that she should get “an Academy Award for this one! This is the best you’ve ever done!”

In another picture, I am in my late teens, standing at the top of the steps of the River Entrance, along with my brother and another friend. We hold a banner that reads in part, “We Remember, We Remember.” I’m squinting into the early morning light and my hand is on my chest. And I do remember, even all these years later, that feeling of dread. I look at the picture and know that my younger self is barely breathing and my heart is racing beneath my hand—I am that afraid. I still feel that.

Protesting a Pentagon That Is Everywhere

Ours was not a solitary witness like that of Baltimore Quaker Norman Morrison who, in November 1965, set himself on fire under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s window to protest the war in Vietnam. With his wife Anne, Morrison was a war-tax resister and peace activist. He was searching for a way to end that grim war. He died of his wounds.

During the Vietnam War there were also huge crowds on the grounds. As many as 50,000 people marched to the Pentagon in a vast and militant October 1967 demonstration, which included an element of the absurd and mystical, a Yippie ritual of exorcism and “transformation” to levitate the Pentagon.

We did not have huge crowds, but we were steady and predictable. Year after year, my family and community made up for our modest numbers by being the most faithful and regular of visitors, willing to risk prison for nonviolent spectacle and witness against war. And we are still there. Every Monday morning at the crack of dawn, a handful of friends brave the cold (or heat) and a long commute to stand with signs of protest inside a fence-enclosed “free speech area.”

But it’s another, tighter, more repressive age when it comes to the war state. Leaflets are no longer allowed, nor are photographs. Any activity or demonstration outside of that grassy little spot is met with arrest, which happens often enough without a lot of media or other attention.

Since September 11, 2001, the nature of war itself has changed. There is no longer really a battlefield except that semi-metaphorical “global” one, nor any clear delineation between civilian and combatant. There are no front lines. War is now total in a new way: in the air and on the ground, human and robotic, online and cyber.

In the process, the “footprint” of the Pentagon has been transformed. On that September day, of course, Flight 77 took out one side of the building, killing 125 people. As part of the reconstruction of the site, a whole series of security upgrades and physical changes were made so that visitors—including protesters—can get nowhere near it without walking a gauntlet of official searches and scrutiny.

At the same time, monstrously huge as it is, the Pentagon is no longer a single place, a single building at all. In its way, in the post-9/11 era, the Pentagon and the complex of military corporations that service and serve it have spread all over Northern Virginia. You can find a mini-Pentagon in the Department of Homeland Security and another in the State Department, not to speak of countless police departments across the country.

So much has changed, but the Doomsday Clock has again tick-tocked back down to three minutes to nuclear midnight and wars are raging at every turn. It’s been a few years since I paid old Uncle Pentagon a visit. I am long overdue.

 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/uncle-pentagon-growing-shadow-american-war-state/
For the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear Warhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/sixty-fourth-time-no-more-nuclear-war/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganAug 5, 2009

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

I can’t help myself. I still think it’s worth bringing up, even for the 64th time. I’m talking, of course, about the atomic obliteration, at the end of a terrible, world-rending war, of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, whose anniversaries– if that’s even the appropriate word for it–are once again upon us.

In this, at least, I know I’m not a typical American: Hiroshima and Nagasaki still seem all too real to me. As the child of anti-nuclear activists, I was raised to pay attention to two significant dates in American history–the day when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber named after the pilot’s mother, dropped Little Boy, a five-ton uranium explosion bomb, on Hiroshima; and the moment, three days later, when another plane, jokingly named Bock’s Car (after the plane’s original pilot), dropped Fat Man (a moniker supposedly given it in honor of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill), a more complex plutonium implosion bomb, on Nagasaki.

When I was little, in preparation for those dates–and in this we were truly a minority of a minority in this country–we showed films documenting the aftermath of the atomic bombings. To this day, I can remember threading our old 16mm projector and then watching the shocking, shaky, grainy, black-and-white footage of ruined cities and ruined bodies filling the living room wall as one of those somber male over-voices narrated the facts.

So now, as the 64th anniversary of so many deaths approaches and thinking the unthinkable remains incomprehensibly in vogue, it seems worth the bother to recall one more time just what it means for the unthinkable to become reality.

The Death Count

In Hiroshima, Little Boy’s huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph Siracusa, author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: “In one terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima… was destroyed. The blast temperature was estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet in diameter.”

Three days later, Fat Man exploded 1,840 feet above Nagasaki, with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. According to “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered,” a web resource on the bombings developed for young people and educators, 286,000 people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped; 74,000 of them were killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously injured.

In addition to those who died immediately, or soon after the bombings, tens of thousands more would succumb to radiation sickness and other radiation-induced maladies in the months, and then years, that followed.

In an article written while he was teaching math at Tufts University in 1983, Tadatoshi Akiba calculated that, by 1950, another 200,000 people had died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb, and 140,000 more were dead in Nagasaki. Dr. Akiba was later elected mayor of Hiroshima and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.

Surviving Hiroshima

Those who somehow managed to survive call themselves Hibakusha, which literally means “those who were bombed.” Most of the inhabitants of those two cities who miraculously made it through those hot and terrible August days are, if alive, now in their seventies or eighties, and they continue to tell their unique stories of horror, destruction, and survival. Their urgent pleas for peace, disarmament, and atonement often go unheard by a twenty-first century American culture that often seems to barely recall what happened last week, much less 64 years ago. Many of them have, over the years, traveled to the United States to tell their stories and show their scars, demanding that we never forget and that the world work towards nuclear disarmament.

Akihiro Takahashi is 77 years old now, but part of him will always be the 14-year-old boy standing in line with his classmates on August 6, 1945, less than a mile from where Little Boy detonated. He still recalls how he and his classmates were knocked off their feet by the blast. When he stood up again, he “felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden. Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat. I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging.”

Since that time, Takahashi has endured many operations and spent countless hours in the hospital to repair the damage wrought in that single instant. On that August morning, he began to walk home–though there were few homes left in the leveled city–stopping to relieve the terrible heat and pain of his burns in the Ota River that flows through Hiroshima.

Along the way, he encountered injured friends, including a boy with terrible burns on the bottoms of his feet whom he half carried along with him. “When we were resting because we were so exhausted,” he related in an oral history, “I found my grandfather’s brother and his wife, in other words, great uncle and great aunt, coming toward us. That was quite [a] coincidence…[W]e have a proverb about meeting Buddha in Hell. My encounter with my relatives at that time was just like that. They seem[ed] to be the Buddha to me wandering in the living hell.”

Jigoku de hotoke ni au you is the phrase. In English, the equivalent would be “an oasis in the desert,” something rare that provides great relief. There were not many such oases in Hiroshima that day.

Imagining Nagasaki

Akihiro Takahashi’s story (of which the above was but a small part) is just one of so many thousands–and hardly one of the grimmest. Of course, 80,000 to 140,000 stories went with their potential tellers to their graves that day. Along with the stories that could be told, there were also the photographs to help us imagine the unimaginable.

Yosuke Yamahata was 28 years old and working for the Japanese News Information Bureau in August 1945. Along with Eiji Yamada, a painter, and Jun Higashi, a writer, he was dispatched to devastated Nagasaki by the Japanese military just hours after Fat Man exploded and instructed to “photograph the situation so as to be as useful as possible for military propaganda.”

Their train arrived at the outskirts of the ruined city in the middle of the night. Here’s how Yamahata describes the scene: “I remember vividly the cold night air and the beautiful starry sky….A warm wind began to blow. Here and there in the distance I saw many small fires, like elf fires, smoldering. Nagasaki had been completely destroyed.” By the time the sun rose, Yamahata had made his way to the center of what was no longer a city. As the day went on, he retraced his steps, along the way taking photographs of the carnage and destruction until he was back at the train station.

All in all, he took 119 photographs that day, capturing some of the most haunting and enduring images of the atomic age. In one, a bloodied boy holding a rice ball stares, his head covered with an air raid hood (a dark cloth that the Japanese military handed out to civilians telling them it would protect them from American bombs); in another, an exhausted-looking woman nurses a badly burnt baby.

In almost every image, the ground is littered with burnt bodies and unattached limbs, household items, rubble, and timbers. As he walked through the missing city, people cried out for water or for help uncovering bodies buried in the rubble. “It is perhaps unforgiveable,” reflected Yamahata, “but in fact at the time I was completely calm and composed. In other words, perhaps it was just too much, too enormous to absorb.” Returning to Tokyo, Yamahata took advantage of the general confusion that surrounded the Japanese surrender to the Americans and managed to hold on to his negatives, rather than turning them over to his superiors.

A handful of his images were published in Japanese newspapers at the end of August 1945, before the American army arrived and the US occupation began. In October 1945, occupation authorities imposed a ban on photographing the atomic sites and on the publication of all atomic-related stories (and the images that went with them). Most of Yamahata’s photographs from Nagasaki were not seen until 1952, after Japan was once again an independent nation and Life Magazine published a few of his Nagasaki photos. That same year almost all the Nagasaki photographs were published in Japan under the title: Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki, A Photographic Record. The book includes sketches by Eiji Yamada and an essay by Jun Higashi, his two companions in Nagasaki that day.

In the introduction, Yamahata wrote: “Human memory has a tendency to slip and critical judgment to fade with the years and with changes in life style and circumstance… These photographs will continue to provide us with an unwavering testimony to the realities of that time.”

Remembering

When I was young, to keep memory from “slipping,” our family and friends marked the anniversary of those terrible days in a distant land with a demonstration or vigil. Often, we ended with a ceremony of remembrance, setting paper lanterns afloat on water in honor of those who died.

Admittedly, this would not pass for a carefree American summer evening, but even as a little girl I came to feel as if I knew some of the A-bomb survivors personally–the experience of Akihiro Takahashi, the photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, and perhaps closest to my heart, the story of Sadako Sasaki.

The children’s book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, written by Eleanor Coerr, brought me close to one girl whose life was cut short by my government’s A-bomb long before I was born. I was then a chubby, sedentary kid, and so found myself strangely intrigued and confused by Sadako’s deep love of running.

She was just two years old when Little Boy exploded above her city, but eight or nine as the book begins, impatient and uncomfortable with all the obligatory ceremonies surrounding the anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima. She did not like to look at the survivors or care to hear the terrible stories. All she wanted to do was run. Lithe, athletic, and popular, Sadako joined a footrace on the very anniversary of the destruction of her city and, when she found herself unable to finish, was taken to the doctor only to discover that she had “atom bomb sickness”–in her case, leukemia.

In the hospital, a friend reminded her of an ancient Japanese belief: if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, the Gods will grant you a wish. So with the help of her classmates, she began to do just that. Scrap paper, candy wrappers, fancy printed paper: all become tiny origami birds of hope.

With her as an inspiration, I learned to fold paper cranes, practicing until I could do so with my eyes closed and fold them as small as a pea. Childhood being childhood, what may have impressed me most was a friend of mine who could fold those origami birds with her toes.

On October 25, 1955, with 356 birds left to go (as Coerr tells it), Sadako died. Since 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden folded crane has stood in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, draped with small paper birds sent from children all over the world, a symbol of peace.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Today

Sixty-four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need more than symbols of peace. Folding paper cranes alone cannot, unfortunately, end the threat of nuclear war. Memories of the destruction fade, the hibakusha grow even older and die, the haunting pictures end up in books stored spine out on bookshelves.

Meanwhile, the terror of nuclear annihilation–so keen at certain moments during the long superpower Cold War stand-off–seems to have worn off almost completely. That’s too bad, since the actual threat of nuclear war remains hidden but potent. The nine nuclear powers–the United States, Russia, France, England, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea — have more than 27,000 operational nuclear weapons among them, enough to destroy several Earth-sized planets. And in May, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that the number of nuclear powers could double in a few years unless new disarmament is a priority. Is it any wonder then that, according to a recent Rasmussen opinion poll, one in five Americans believe nuclear war “very likely” in this century, and more than half, “likely”?

The unthinkable is still under consideration–even as the Obama administration takes its first steps in the right direction. In an April speech in Prague, President Obama publicly embraced the goal of seeking “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” In its wake, his administration has begun taking still quite modest but potentially important steps towards that goal, including: renewed talks with Russia over mutual nuclear reductions, conversations initiated in the Senate about jump-starting the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban, stalled these last ten years, and of negotiations for the also stalled Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, imagined as an internationally verified ban on the production of nuclear materials for weapons.

Right now, however, the American nuclear landscape–little acknowledged or discussed–remains grimly potent. According to the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the United States still maintains a nuclear stockpile estimated at 5,200 warheads–of which approximately 2,700 are operational (with the rest in reserve), while the Obama administration will spend more than $6 billion on the research and development of nuclear weapons this year alone.

At some point early next year, the administration will complete a Nuclear Posture Review outlining the role it believes nuclear weapons should play in the American pantheon of power, and, if the president follows through on his anti-nuclear statements, perhaps that document will at least begin to limit the scenarios in which such weapons could be used. In the meantime, the policy of the United States remains no different than it was in 2004, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy. It said, in part, that the United States possesses nuclear weapons for the purposes of “destroying those critical war-making and war-supporting assets and capabilities that a potential enemy leadership values most and that it would rely on to achieve its own objectives in a post-war world.” Read that sentence again, and think, under such a doctrine, what might the United States not bomb?

Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when compared to today’s typical nuclear weapon. Little Boy was a 15 kiloton warhead. Most of the warheads in the US arsenal today are 100 or 300 kilotons–capable of taking out not a Japanese city of 1945 but a modern megalopolis. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and a former launch-control officer in charge of Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles armed with 170, 300, and 335 kiloton warheads, pointed out a few years ago that, within twelve minutes, the United States and Russia could launch the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshimas.

It is unthinkable. It seems unimaginable. It sounds like hyperbole, but consider it an uncomfortable and necessary truth. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the children of our future need us to understand this and act upon it–sixty years too late…and not a minute too soon.



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Is the Next Defense Budget a Stimulus Package?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/next-defense-budget-stimulus-package/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganMar 12, 2009

This essay originally appeared on TomDispatch

“Shovel-ready.”

It’s the magic incantation to fix our economic woes. Many states and federal agencies have already gone from scouring their budgets for things to cut to green- lighting construction projects. The Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package is sure to muster many shovels in an effort to rouse a despondent economy and put Americans back to work.

Here’s the strange thing, though: That package was headline news for weeks, bitterly argued over, hailed and derided in equal measure. And yet road construction, housing projects and green retrofits aren’t the only major projects getting the shovel-ready treatment via massive infusions of cash.

At the end of February, another huge “stimulus” package was announced but generated almost no comment, controversy, or argument. The defense industry received its own special stimulus package — news of the dollars available for the Pentagon budget in 2010; and at nearly $700 billion (when all the bits and pieces are added in), it’s almost as big as the Obama economic package and sure to be a lot less effective.

Despite the sort of economic maelstrom not seen in generations, the defense industry, insulated by an enduring conviction that war spending stimulates the economy, remains almost impervious to budget cuts. To understand why military spending is no longer a stimulus driver means putting aside memories of Rosie the Riveter and the sepia-hued worker on the bomber assembly line and remembering instead that the Great Depression came before “the Good War,” not the other way around. In World War II, it’s also important to recall, the massive military buildup was labor intensive, employed millions, and was accompanied by rationing, austerity and very high taxes.

This time around, we began with boom years and spent our way into the breach, in significant part by launching unnecessary, profligate wars. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush cut taxes at a more than peacetime pace and borrowed like an addicted gambler on a losing streak to underwrite his wars of choice, including his “Global War on Terror.” If the former president’s nearly trillion-dollar (and counting) global war got us into this mess, by simple logic it’s not likely to bail us out as well.

Riding the Slide to Billions

While the good times rolled during the long slide from surplus to deficit, from no war to global war, it wasn’t just the Merrill Lynches and subprime mortgage giants that cleaned up. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman–the top three defense contractors–had a ball, too.

In 2002, the first full year of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror, for instance, those three companies–ranking first, second, and third on the Pentagon’s list of top ten contractors–split $42 billion in contract awards, more than two-thirds of the $67 billion distributed among the top ten Pentagon contractors.

In 2007, the last year for which full contracting data is available, the same Big Three split $69 billion in Pentagon contracts, which was more than the total received by the top 10 companies just five years earlier. The top ten divvied up $121 billion in contracts in 2007, an 80 percent increase over 2002. Lockheed Martin, the number-one Pentagon contractor, graduated from a mere $17 billion in awarded contracts in 2002 to $28 billion in 2007. That’s a leap of 64 percent. Given such figures, it’s easy enough to understand how the basic military budget–excluding money for actual war-fighting–jumped from about $300 billion to more than $500 billion during the Bush years.

Given the economic climate, it’s no surprise that the three defense giants have all posted losses in the past few weeks. But before the hankies come out and the histrionics start, it should be noted that Lockheed Martin alone has an $81 billion backlog in orders, enough to keep chugging along for another two years without a single new contract.

If such war spending had been an effective stimulus for the economy, we would be roaring along on twelve cylinders today. But increasingly this kind of spending mainly stimulates corporate shareholders, stock prices and (of course) war itself.

No matter, the staggering new defense budget ensures that, for the defense industry, some version of good times will continue to roll, even if the economic impact of these huge military investments proves negligible and the need in other areas is staggering.

The 2010 Defense Budget

President Obama is reportedly intent on digging deep into the Pentagon budget. He has given his Office of Management and Budget until April to complete an “exhaustive line-by-line” review of the detailed budget request before it is released. In speeches, he has focused on wasteful and unnecessary defense spending.

Just days ago, Obama insisted that “the days of giving defense contractors a blank check are over.” To underline that assertion, he cited a 2008 Government Accountability Office study that found 95 military projects over budget by a total of $295 billion. He pledged to end such egregious practices, and the no-bid contracts that often go with them. That applause line plays well at a time when belts are tightening uncomfortably and boot straps remain elusive, but it misses a reality, no less potentially important in the Obama era than in the preceding one: for (at least) the last eight years, defense contractors haven’t needed a “blank check” because they already have the combination to the safe, the PIN number to the account and a controlling interest on the board of the bank.

Given the promised size of the next Pentagon budget, no matter what weapons programs are cut or companies and contracts disciplined, the “bank board” will remain the same because the overall amount available to it shows no signs of changing. In fact, basic funding levels (not including money still being set aside for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) are remarkably in line with the most recent Bush administration budget, right down to prospective further increases. The just-released overall figure for the 2010 Pentagon budget is actually $533.7 billion; that is, $20.4 billion higher than Bush’s last base budget.

President Obama does not like the term “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), dispensing with the Bush administration’s moniker of choice to describe the most costly array of military operations since World War II. But Obama’s Pentagon will continue to spend a GWOT-sized chunk of our national treasure, even as troops trickle home from Iraq and the surge relocates to Afghanistan’s inhospitable steppes. The preliminary figure for war-fighting in 2010 is $130 billion, which represents a modest decrease from the $144 billion that is expected to go to military operations in 2009. Add that to the base Pentagon budget and you get a subtotal of $664 billion for 2010 military expenditures.

If the estimated costs of military spending lodged in other parts of the federal budget (like funding for nuclear weapons, which is considered the bailiwick of the Department of Energy), as well as miscellaneous non-Defense Department defense costs–about $23 billion last time around–are also included, then President Obama’s first military budget should come in at around $670 billion.

After the preliminary budget figures were released, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters, “In our country’s current economic circumstances, I believe that represents a strong commitment to our security.” Almost $700 billion is a strong commitment alright. Unfortunately, as a stimulus commitment–and a largely unquestioned one at that–it is certain to prove a drag on our economic recovery, despite the claims of the defense industry and their ever-present publicists and lobbyists.

Lifting America by the (Combat) Bootstraps?

And are we hearing those claims these days! The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), representing more than 100 leading defense and aerospace corporations, has been trumpeting their contributions to the economy in a print ad campaign and on their website under the catch-phrase: “Aerospace and Defense: The Strength to Lift America.”

In terms of American well-being, the AIA estimates that defense and aerospace manufacturers contribute $97 billion in exports a year, while maintaining 2 million jobs. As Fred Downey, an association vice president, told the Associated Press, “Our industry is ready and able to lead the way out of the economic crisis.”

As the association sees it, defense and aerospace corporations are about as shovel-ready as you can get. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), however, offers quite a different view of the AIA’s two-million jobs claim. Their “Career Guide to Industries,” for example, looks intensively at Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing (which would also include some non-defense related corporations) and finds that the sector employed 472,000 wage and salary workers in 2006. Now, this is not the whole picture of defense-related employment, but according to the Associated Press, the BLS estimates that only 647,000 people work in industries where at least one-fifth of the products are defense-related.

Perhaps the AIA was including not just jobs making weapons but jobs lobbying Congress to pay for them. Then Downey and crew might almost have a case. The BLS would probably not consider lobbyist jobs to be defense-related, but maybe they should, because the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks money in politics, reports that the industry spent $149 million on lobbying firms to get its points across to Congress and the administration last year. That has to be a lot of shovel-ready jobs right there.

Speaking of shovel-ready jobs shoveling out defense industry claims, if the lobbying sector is happy, ad firms must be ecstatic. These days, defense contractors and associations are spending striking sums on what’s politely termed “public education”: full-page ads in major newspapers, ads in Washington metro stations near the Pentagon, Crystal City (a Virginia community where many Pentagon satellite offices are located), Capitol Hill and other places where the powerful congregate when their limos are in use, not to speak of aggressive pop-up ads on political news sites like the National Journal.

Lockheed Martin, for example, recently unveiled a new ad campaign pitched towards troubled economic times. It depicts proud blue-collar workers above the tagline: “95,000 employed, 300 million protected.” At the bottom of the ad are the logos of the supersonic fighter plane known as the F-22 Raptor and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers whose members build it. As if to underline these messages, 200 members of Congress signed a January 20 “Dear Mr. President, Save the F-22” letter, meant to be waiting for Barack Obama as he entered the Oval Office. The letter asserted that the F-22 program “annually provides over $12 billion of economic activity to the national economy.”

Even if that dubious claim were substantiated, the economic activity comes at a high cost. The United States spent more than $65 billion to design and produce the F-22 Raptor–a fighter plane originally conceived to penetrate the airspace of the long-extinct Soviet Union, to counter large formations of enemy bombers in cold war scenarios that are today inconceivable, and to achieve air superiority high over Eastern Europe whose greatest problems now involve a potential region-wide economic meltdown. In the wake of the cold war, as military analyst Chalmers Johnson recently pointed out, the F-22 lacks a role in any imaginable war-fighting scenario the US might actually find itself in.

Efforts to promote the plane as a critical tool in the Global War on Terror floundered when Defense Secretary Gates spoke plainly about the system’s uselessness last year. “The reality,” he said, “is we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater.”

Fortunately for Lockheed Martin, once the US economy began to crater, it could emphasize a new on-the-ground use for the F-22–as an instant make-work jobs program.

However, even there the plane’s utility is questionable. William D. Hartung, director of the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative, points out that, if the F-22 program is cut, the “job losses will be stretched out over two and half years or more, and could happen after the end of the current recession.” In addition, Lockheed has had to back away from the 95,000 jobs claims, clarifying that more than 70 percent of those jobs are only indirectly related to the F-22, and that just 25,000 workers are employed directly on the plane’s construction. Winslow Wheeler is the head of the Center for Defense Information’s Straus Military Reform Project and his scholarship is built on more than thirty years of service at the Government Accountability Office and on the Senate Budget Committee, among other places. He points out that, when it comes to high-tech weapons, today’s military-industrial complex bears not the slightest resemblance to its World War II predecessor as a job generator. As he describes it, in the early 1940s “production lines cranked out thousands of aircraft each month: as fast as the government could stuff money, materials and workers into the assembly line.”

In stark contrast, the F-22, he points out, is essentially an artisanal product. “Go to Lockheed Martin’s plant,” he writes. “You will find no detectable movement of aircraft out the door. Instead you will see virtually stationary aircraft and workers applying parts in a manner more evocative of hand-crafting. This ‘production rate’ generates one F-22 every 18 days or so.” This is, in fact, what shovel-ready largely means in Pentagon stimulus terms these days.

War for Jobs?

Economists have also weighed in on why “war for jobs” as a way out of recession or depression has entered the world of mythology. An analysis from the University of Massachusetts’s Political Economy Research Institute, for instance, finds that, for every one billion dollars invested in defense, 8,555 jobs are created. By contrast, the same billion invested in health care would create 12,883 jobs, and in education, 17,687 jobs or more than double the defense stimulus payoff.

It has often been said that World War II–and the production stimulus it offered–lifted the United States out of the Great Depression. Today, the opposite seems to be the case. The “war economy” helped propel the US into what might turn out to be another great depression, and so, unlike in 1929, as our economy crumbles today, we are already on a global war footing.

As the Obama administration grapples with economic disaster and inherited wars, it will have the added challenge of confronting a military-industrial complex accustomed to budgets that reach almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars, based on exaggerated global threats, unsubstantiated economic claims, and entrenched profligacy. When Obama’s analysts pore over the budget, looking at all those overpriced weapons and plum contracts, they’ll have to ask: Is each weapons system or program actually needed for American security and is it cost effective? Or are the defense contractors shoveling a load of shovel-ready bull?



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Can Obama Take On the Pentagon?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/can-obama-take-pentagon/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida BerriganNov 25, 2008

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Even saddled with a two-front, budget-busting war and a collapsing economy, President Barack Obama may be able to accomplish a lot. With a friendly Congress and a relieved world, he could make short work of some of the most egregious overreaches of the Bush White House–from Guantánamo to those presidential signing statements. For all the rolling up of sleeves and “everything is going to change” exuberance, however, taking on the Pentagon, with its mega-budget and its mega-power, may be the hardest task he faces.

The Mega-Pentagon

Under President George W. Bush, military spending increased by about 60 percent, and that’s not including spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eight years ago, as Bush prepared to enter the Oval Office, military spending totaled just over $300 billion. When Obama sets foot in that same office, military spending will total roughly $541 billion, including the Pentagon’s basic budget and nuclear warhead work in the Department of Energy.

And remember, that’s before the “Global War on Terror” enters the picture. The Pentagon now estimates that military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost at least $170 billion in 2009, pushing total military spending for Obama’s first year to about $711 billion (a number that is mind-bogglingly large and at the same time a relatively conservative estimate that does not, for example, include intelligence funding, veterans’ care or other security costs).

With such numbers, it’s no surprise that the United States is, by a multiple of nearly six, the biggest military spender in the world. (China’s military budget, the closest competitor, comes in at a “mere” $120 billion.) Still, it can be startling to confront the simple fact that the United States alone accounts for nearly half of all global military spending–to be as exact as possible in such a murky area, 48 percent according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. That’s more than what the next forty-five nations together spend on their militaries on an annual basis.

Again, keep in mind that war spending for 2009 comes on top of the estimated $864 billion that lawmakers have, since 2001, appropriated for the Iraq War and occupation, ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and other activities associated with the GWOT. In fact, according to an October 2008 report by the Congressional Research Service, total war spending, quite apart from the regular military budget, is already at $922 billion and quickly closing in on the trillion-dollar mark.

Common Sense Cuts?

Years late, and with budgets everywhere bleeding red, some in Congress and elsewhere are finally raising questions about whether this level of spending makes any sense. Unfortunately, the questions are not coming from the inner circle of the president-elect.

Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) drew the ire and consternation of hard-line Republicans and military hawks when, in October, he suggested that Congress should consider cutting defense spending by a quarter. That would mean shaving $177 billion, leaving $534 billion for the US defense and war budget and maintaining a significant distance–$413 billion, to be exact–between the United States and our next “peer competitor.” Frank told a Massachusetts newspaper editorial board that, in the context of a struggling economy, the Pentagon will have to start choosing among its many weapons programs. “We don’t need all these fancy new weapons,” he told the staff of the New Bedford Standard Times. Obama did not back him up on that.

Even the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, John Murtha (D-PA), a Congressman who never saw a weapons program he didn’t want to buy, warned of tough choices on the horizon. While he did not put a number on it, in a recent interview he did say: “The next president is going to be forced to decrease defense spending in order to respond to neglected domestic priorities. Because of this, the Defense Department is going to have to make tough budget decisions involving trade-offs between personnel, procurement and future weapons spending.”

And now, President-elect Obama is hearing a similar message from the Defense Business Board, established in 2001 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to give advice to the Pentagon. A few weeks ago, in briefing papers prepared for the president-elect’s transition team, the board, hardly an outfit unfriendly to the Pentagon, argued that some of the Defense Department’s big weapons projects needed to be scrapped as the United States entered a “period of fiscal constraint in a tough economy.” While not listing the programs they considered knife-worthy, the board did assert that “business as usual is no longer an option.”

Desperate Defense

Meanwhile, defense executives and industry analysts are predicting the worst. Boeing CEO Jim McNerney wrote in a “ note” to employees, “No one really yet knows when or to what extent defense spending could be affected, but it’s unrealistic to think there won’t be some measure of impact.” Michael Farage, Sikorsky’s director of Air Force programs, was even more colorful: “With the economy in the proverbial pooper, defense budgets can only go down.”

Kevin G. Kroger, president of a company making oil filters for Army trucks, offered a typical reaction: “There’s a lot of uncertainty out there. We’re not sure where the budgets are going and what’s going to get funded. It leaves us nervous.”

It’s no surprise that, despite eight years of glut financing via the “Global War on Terror,” weapons manufacturers, like the automotive Big Three, are now looking for their own bailout. For them, however, it should probably be thought of as a bail-up, an assurance of yet more good times. Even though in recent years their companies have enjoyed strong stock prices, have seen major increases in Pentagon contracts and are still looking at boom-time foreign weapons sales, expect them to push hard for a bottom-line guarantee via their Holy Grail–a military budget pegged to the gross domestic product.

“We advocate 4 percent of the GDP as a floor for defense spending. No question that has to be front and center for any new president’s agenda,” says Marion Blakey, president of the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group representing companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Listening to defense industry figures talk, you could get the impression that the Pentagon’s larder was empty and that the pinching of pennies and tightening of belts was well under way. While the cuts suggested by the Defense Business Board report got a lot of attention, the Pentagon is already quietly laying the groundwork to lock the future Obama administration into what is possibly only a slightly scaled-down version of the over-the-top military spending of the Bush years.

Business as Usual?

At the beginning of October, the Pentagon’s latest five-year projection of budget needs was revealed in Congressional Quarterly. These preliminary figures–the full request should be released sometime next month–indicate that the Pentagon’s starting point in its bargaining with the new administration and Congress comes down to one word: more.

The estimates project $450 billion more in spending over those five years than previously suggested figures. Take fiscal year 2010: the Pentagon is evidently calling for a military budget of $584 billion, an increase of $57 billion over what they informed President Bush and Congress they would need just a few months ago.

Unfortunately, when it comes to military spending and defense, the record is reasonably clear–Obama is not about to go toe to toe with the military-industrial complex.

On the campaign trail, his stump speech included this applause-ready line suggesting that the costs of the war in Iraq are taking away from important domestic priorities: “If we’re spending $10 billion a month [in Iraq] over the next four or five years, that’s $10 billion a month we’re not using to rebuild the US, or drawing down our national debt, or making sure that families have healthcare.”

But the “surge” that Obama wants to shift from Iraq to Afghanistan is unlikely to be a bargain. In addition, he has repeatedly argued for a spike in defense spending to “reset” a military force worn out by war. He has also called for the expansion of the size of the Army and the Marines. On that point, he is in complete agreement with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. They even use the same numbers, suggesting that the Army should be augmented by 65,000 new recruits and the Marines, by 27,000. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that these manpower increases alone would add about $10 billion a year–that same campaign trail $10 billion–to the Pentagon budget over a five-year period.

The word from Wall Street? In a report entitled “Early Thoughts on Obama and Defense,” a Morgan Stanley researcher wrote on November 5, “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…. In addition, we believe, based on discussions with industry sources that Obama has agreed not to cut the defense budget at least until the first eighteen months of his term as the national security situation becomes better understood.”

In other words: Don’t worry about it. President Obama is not about to hand the next secretary of defense a box of brownie mix and order him to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Smarter, Not More, Military Spending

Sooner rather than later, the new administration will need to think seriously about how to spend smarter–and significantly less–on the military. Our nose-diving economy simply will no longer support ever-climbing defense budgets.

The good news is that the Obama administration won’t have to figure it all out alone. The contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus’s new Unified Security Budget have done a lot of the heavy lifting to demonstrate that some of the choices that need to be made really aren’t so tough. The report makes the case for reductions in military spending on outdated or unproven weapons systems totaling $61 billion. The argument is simple and straightforward: these expensive systems don’t keep us safe. Some were designed for a geopolitical moment that is long gone–like the F-22, meant to counter a Soviet plane that was never built. Others, like the ballistic missile defense program, are clearly meant only to perpetuate insecurity and provoke proliferation.

To cut the military budget more deeply, however, means more than canceling useless, high-tech weapons systems. It means taking on something fundamental and far-reaching: America’s place in the world. It means coming to grips with how we garrison the planet, use our military to project influence and power anywhere in the world, with our attitudes toward international treaties and agreements, with our vast passels of real estate in foreign lands and, of course, with our economic and political relationships with clients and competitors.

As a candidate, Barack Obama stirred our imagination through his calls for a “new era of international cooperation.” The United States cannot, however, cooperate with other nations from atop our shining Green Zone on the hill; we cannot cooperate as the world’s sole superpower, policeman, cowboy, hyperpower, or whatever the imperial nom du jour turns out to be. Bottom line: we cannot genuinely and effectively cooperate while spending more on what we like to call “security” than the next forty-five nations combined.

A new era in Pentagon spending would have to begin with a recognition that enduring security is not attained by threat or fiat, nor is it bought with staggeringly many billions of dollars. It is built with other nations. Weapons come second.



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Operation Endless Deploymenthttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/operation-endless-deployment/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,William D. Hartung,Michelle Ciarrocca,Frida BerriganOct 3, 2002

The Bush Administration’s march toward war in Iraq is dangerous in its own right, and should be opposed as such. But the preparations for “Gulf War II” are also part of a larger plan to promote the most significant expansion of US global military presence since the end of the cold war. The Pentagon is determined to maintain access to the rapidly growing network of military facilities it has built or refurbished in the Caucasus, South Asia and the Persian Gulf for decades to come, long after George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein have passed from the global stage.

In the fall of 1999, in his first major campaign speech on foreign policy, Bush criticized the Clinton Administration for sending US troops off on “aimless and endless deployments” that allegedly detracted from their core mission of fighting and winning wars. Bush was primarily referring to US peacekeeping missions in places like Kosovo, but he gave the impression that he was planning to reduce the overall US military presence overseas as well. Three years later, Bush’s pledge to seek a more streamlined US global military presence has been cast aside under the guise of fighting “terrorists and tyrants” of Washington’s choosing.

Since September 2001 US forces have built, upgraded or expanded military facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan; authorized extended training missions or open-ended troop deployments in Djibouti, the Philippines and the former Soviet republic of Georgia; negotiated access to airfields in Kazakhstan; and engaged in major military exercises, involving thousands of US personnel, in Jordan, Kuwait and India. Thousands of tons of military equipment have been added to stockpiles already pre-positioned in Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf states, including Israel, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar. And discussions are still under way with Yemen about increasing American access to facilities there and establishing an intelligence-gathering installation aimed at monitoring activities in Sudan and Somalia.

These forward bases, many of which have been arranged through secretive, ad hoc arrangements, currently house an estimated 60,000 US military personnel. This includes 20,000-25,000 troops in the Persian Gulf, poised to serve as the opening wave of a US invasion of Iraq.

Funds for training and military aid, which are often used to grease the wheels of US access to overseas military facilities, have been increased substantially since the start of the Administration’s war on terrorism. The budget request for training foreign military personnel is up by 27 percent in the fiscal-year 2003 budget, while funding for the government’s largest military aid program, Foreign Military Financing, is slated to top $4 billion. The bulk of this additional funding is going to countries like Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India, which had previously been under restrictions on what they could receive from the United States because of records of systematic human rights abuses, antidemocratic practices or development of nuclear weapons. Now these same nations are viewed as indispensable allies in the Administration’s war on terrorism.

The new global buildup represents not so much a return to the cold war, when the United States had many more troops stationed overseas than it does today, but rather an elaboration of a new, more flexible infrastructure for intervening in–or initiating–“hot wars” from the Middle East to the Caucasus to East Asia.

Military analyst William Arkin has noted that in the first four months after the September 11 attacks, thirteen military tent cities were hastily assembled to shelter US personnel in nine different countries. Many of the sites include “expeditionary airfields” that were built or upgraded on short notice to facilitate their use by US combat and transport planes.

Despite protestations to the contrary by Pentagon officials, there are questions about how many of the new US forward bases will in fact be temporary. The US Central Command has long been seeking alternatives to Saudi Arabia to use as springboards for future interventions in the Persian Gulf, as well as access to facilities in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. While Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been purposely vague about the length of the US stay at any of the new facilities, Air Force Col. Billy Montgomery, who headed a team that expanded an air base in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for use by US and allied forces in Afghanistan, told the Washington Post, “I think it’s fair to say there will be a long-term presence here well beyond the end of hostilities.”

In a mid-August briefing, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, suggested that the length of the US military presence in Afghanistan could end up rivaling the fifty-year US presence in South Korea. And if the Bush Administration is not dissuaded from moving full-speed ahead with its plans to invade Iraq, several independent military experts have suggested that an occupying force of 75,000-100,000 troops may be needed to stabilize that country, giving rise to the need for additional formal or informal bases to house US troops.

Growing US Military Presence Since 9/11/01

Qatar: With 600 war planners from the US Central Command scheduled to arrive in November for an “exercise” that could turn into a long-term deployment, it is widely believed that Qatar will serve as the principal base for coordinating US intervention in Iraq. The Pentagon began pouring additional personnel and funding into Qatar’s Al Udeid air base in November 2001 in hopes of using it as an alternative to Saudi bases in the event of military action against Iraq. The facility now has a command center with satellite links that will enable it to coordinate thousands of airstrikes daily. The base, which has one of the longest runways in the Middle East, is currently home to roughly 3,000 US personnel and fifty aircraft, including fighters, bombers and reconnaissance and refueling aircraft. There are also 600 US personnel stationed at an air logistics base in Qatar–referred to by Army officials as “Camp Snoopy”–at which C-5 and C-17 cargo planes routinely come and go, bringing supplies for US forces in Afghanistan and the Gulf. Qatar and Kuwait (see below) are also host to more than three dozen 60,000-square-foot warehouses that contain hundreds of US military vehicles, ranging from M-1 tanks and armored personnel carriers to 155-millimeter howitzers.

Jordan:

Despite public pronouncements by Jordanian officials that their nation will not serve as a launching pad for a US attack on Iraq, US-Jordanian military cooperation has been increasing. During August, 2,200 personnel of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit were in Jordan for “Operation Infinite Moonlight,” which several analysts believe was used as a cover to pre-position additional US military equipment in the Persian Gulf in preparation for war with Iraq. Recent press reports indicate that US forces also have regular access to Jordanian air bases at Ruwayshid and Wadi-al Murbah, both of which are close to the Iraqi border.

Kuwait:

Camp Doha is home to 5,000 US Army personnel, plus thousands more that come for regular military exercises in Kuwait. Counting troops in-country for extended exercises and air crews involved in flying F-16 and F-15 aircraft on surveillance missions over southern Iraq, there are now estimated to be more than 9,000 US military personnel in Kuwait. As of the first week of September, 2,000 US troops were en route to Kuwait for “Operation Desert Spring,” an exercise slated to last several months. More than sixty military vehicles are being shipped to Kuwait as part of the exercise, apparently in an effort to bulk up the US arsenal there in anticipation of a war against Iraq.

Saudi Arabia:

As a tacit side agreement to the controversial 1981 sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia, US contractors built an unparalleled network of air, naval and communications bases in Saudi Arabia that served as the main base of operations for US forces in the Gulf War. The most important of these facilities is the Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh, which has served as the coordinating center for air operations over Iraq and Afghanistan. After initially stating that Saudi bases could not be used for a US strike against Iraq, Saudi officials have now stated that the facilities will be available, provided that the intervention is sanctioned by the UN Security Council. There are currently more than 6,000 US Air Force and Army personnel in Saudi Arabia.

Oman:

The United States is upgrading an airfield at Musnana for use as an air base that will house everything from fighter aircraft to B-52 bombers. According to GlobalSecurity.org, the United States has used three other bases in Oman to launch airstrikes against Afghanistan. A base at Masirah hosts US P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft and AC-130 gunships. Oman is also a major pre-positioning site for the US Air Force, with enough equipment and fuel stored to support three bases and 26,000 support personnel.

Bahrain:

The US Fifth Fleet, which coordinates all US combat ships in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean areas, has its headquarters at Manama, Bahrain. Twenty miles south of Manama, Shaikh Isa Air Base hosts US bomber and fighter aircraft, and is expected to serve as the home for a US Air Force expeditionary wing of forty-two aircraft in the near future. Total US personnel in Bahrain number 4,000 or more, most of them in the Navy or Marines.

United Arab Emirates:

The United States has no ongoing military presence in the UAE, but the government allows US reconnaissance and refueling aircraft to use its air bases, and there is some US equipment pre-positioned there for use in contingencies like the Bush Administration’s planned intervention in Iraq.

Diego Garcia:

In August the Pentagon awarded a contract to a Norfolk, Virginia, shipping company to operate eight large “roll-on, roll-off” cargo ships in and around the US base at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. B-52s based there are likely to come into play in any air war against Iraq; the island may also serve as a stopover point and distribution center for US personnel and equipment headed to the Gulf.

Yemen:

The Pentagon is exploring the possibility of building a signals intelligence base on the Yemeni island of Socotra that would be used to conduct surveillance on Somalia and the Horn of Africa. This past June, a US team arrived in Yemen to begin installation of a computerized surveillance system designed to link the capital of Sanaa with data flowing from major seas, airports and border crossings.

Djibouti:

In mid-September it was revealed that 800 US personnel, most of them Special Operations forces, have been deployed in the East African nation of Djibouti, poised for deployment in Yemen, Somalia or Sudan in pursuit of alleged Al Qaeda operatives. The Special Forces deployment is backed up by the stationing nearby of the Belleau Wood, an amphibious assault ship with helicopters and Harrier jump jets that can be used to transport US personnel in Djibouti into battle in neighboring nations.

Turkey:

Turkey’s Incirlik air base, which has served as the launching ground for US airstrikes and surveillance missions over northern Iraq for more than a decade, is home to an estimated four dozen US surveillance and strike aircraft (the exact number is classified). The Pentagon hopes to use Incirlik as a major staging ground in its planned air war against Iraq, and has been courting Ankara with major arms sales, including transfers of Seahawk antisubmarine helicopters, two fully outfitted combat frigates and a pledge to cancel a substantial portion of Turkey’s multibillion-dollar military debt to the United States.

Georgia:

As part of a two-year, $64 million “train and equip” mission, US Special Forces will be deployed to Georgia to train a 2,000-person antiterrorist force designed to patrol the Pankisi Gorge, an alleged refuge for Chechen rebels and Al Qaeda fighters. Barracks and other facilities for the US trainers will be built in cooperation with the Kellogg Brown & Root division of Halliburton industries.

Afghanistan:

The two main US bases in Afghanistan are at Bagram, where the headquarters for US military operations in the country is based, along with roughly 5,000 US personnel; and in Kandahar, where 3,000-4,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division are based, along with a detention facility for Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.

Pakistan:

Pursuant to an agreement struck with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last December, US forces have taken over an air base at Jacobabad, in southwestern Pakistan, and are building air-conditioned barracks and a higher security wall. American forces will also continue to use airfields at Pasni and Dalbandin for the foreseeable future, as part of what one Pakistani source predicts will become a “semipermanent presence” of US forces in Pakistan.

Uzbekistan:

Roughly 1,500 US troops are stationed at Khanabad, a former Soviet facility that is the largest air base in Central Asia. The US Air Force is scouting sites to set up a more permanent facility in Uzbekistan.

Kyrgyzstan:

The Manas air base, also known as the Peter J. Ganci base in honor of a New York City fireman who died in the World Trade Center rescue effort, is home to 2,000 troops–1,000 American and 1,000 from coalition partners Australia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea and Spain. American officials claim that the base will be closed after the war in Afghanistan is over, but sources familiar with the extensive infrastructure that has been built, including a central power plant, a hospital and two industrial-size kitchens, expect US forces to be stationed there for years to come.

Kazakhstan:

This past July the United States and Kazakhstan signed an agreement to allow US military aircraft to make emergency landings–for a fee–at Kazakhstan’s largest civilian airport, in Almaty. In addition, the Bush Administration has requested $5 million in military aid in the fiscal-year 2003 budget to refurbish an air base in order to establish “a US-interoperable base along the oil-rich Caspian.”

Tajikistan:

After the September 11 attacks, Tajikistan was one of the first Central Asian states to offer the Pentagon access to bases, overflight rights and the use of its territory by US military personnel. Bases at Khujand, Kulyab and Kurgan-Tyube are available to US forces as needed, but unlike the larger bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, they have yet to become a major focus of activity.

Philippines:

More than 1,300 US troops were involved in “counterterrorism training” in the Philippines from February through July of this year, assisting local military forces in their efforts to wipe out the remnants of the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla movement, which Philippine security officials claim forged ties with Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. In parallel to the training mission, US military aid to the Philippines was increased tenfold, from $1.9 million to $19 million. A cadre of 100 US military personnel remained in the Philippines after the larger contingent withdrew in July. The Pentagon plans several other major training missions in the Philippines in the next year.

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Sources: Center for Defense Information; GlobalSecurity.org; David Isenberg, “By Infinite Moonlight, US Readies for War,” Asia Times, August 29, 2002; US Defense Department; and numerous news stories from the Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New Orleans Times-Picayune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and William Arkin’s “Dot.mil” column in the Washington Post Online.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/operation-endless-deployment/
War, Inc.https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/war-inc/Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,Frida Berrigan,William D. Hartung,Michelle Ciarrocca,Frida Berrigan,William D. Hartung,Michelle Ciarrocca,Frida BerriganOct 3, 2002 Expanding the US global military presence is costly to taxpayers but highly profitable for private military contractors.]]>

Expanding the US global military presence is costly to taxpayers but highly profitable for private military contractors. Even the costs of allegedly temporary facilities and deployments have been substantial: Many of the new bases include bowling allies, swimming pools, air-conditioned quarters, elaborate communications systems and other features that make them seem more like small, self-contained towns than transient setups.

Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Vice President Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, has been contracted to provide comprehensive logistical support for US bases in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere in the region. The company’s services are likely to be expensive: When Brown & Root was hired to provide similar services for Camp Bondsteel, the major US base camp in Kosovo, it ended up ringing up a record $2.2 billion in costs while wasting millions of dollars on excess purchases of everything from furniture to electric power. Brown & Root also has a Pentagon contract that could yield up to $300 million over a five-year period to maintain and expand the US military prison for “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

While a full-scale war in Iraq will redound most heavily to the benefit of major weapons makers like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, which will get the contracts for precision bombs, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles that will be used in the conflict, lesser-known firms are already profiting from the expanding US global presence. In August, Maersk Lines of Norfolk, Virginia, received a contract for $219 million from the Pentagon’s Military Sealift Command to provide eight “roll-on, roll-off” cargo ships to operate in the Indian Ocean near the Diego Garcia base; in May DG-21, a Dallas-based firm, received a $20 million add-on to a $200 million “base operating support contract” for work at Diego Garcia.



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