Culture Change e-Letter
#29
Goodbye to the War Party ("Republicrats"
et al) and the nuclear threat
by Jan Lundberg
There will unfortunately be another major nuclear
"accident" or "incident," it would seem. It might be one blast or a
meltdown, or a nuclear weapons exchange. It could happen in Korea, the Middle
East, Europe, or the U.S. or elsewhere.
We must face
our worst fears, if we as citizens are to deal with this outrageous state of
affairs. Thousands of nuclear-warheaded missiles are on hair-trigger alert
aimed at and from the U.S., and accidental launch has almost happened many
times.
In hopes of a less extreme nuclear
event, we can anticipate the preferred political result and start now to
influence the outcome. I predict a peaceful, electoral kind of overall
regime change worldwide that will be the triumph of the peace movement. Change will not come
from the top; Congress could impeach President Bush —
but leaders aren't leading.
Initially, the U.S. government,
in
keeping with its might-makes-right philosophy, might try
unprecedented tactics against
the "evil terrorists" as well as the pro-peace camp. But popular
outrage against the use of nukes may bring on immediate response by voters at
their first opportunity. Where honest voting is thwarted, a Gandhian
movement may subsequently prevail.
The next nuke disaster is
going to wake a lot of people up and galvanize them into action. There was
almost enough of a movement in the streets to derail the war-of-aggression plan
against Iraq. After a nuclear disaster, which is downright unacceptable to
any sane person, people will refuse to allow our fair planet from being further
abused and our young and unborn to be zapped. The Chernobyl disaster
eventually killed 10,000 U.S.
citizens due to fallout, in addition to victims closer to the accident, but that event's
"opportunity" became merely a partial wake-up call. Our future is
still being stolen by idiot meanies and their nukes,
so people are poised —
whether they know it or not —
to hit the streets and nonviolently
"throw the bums out."
We have had the War Party, up to
here. The greed machine is inextricably part of the War Party.
Eleven years ago Americans got fooled for the last time when peace activists
supported Clinton/Gore. People hoped for the best, but most citizens to a
large degree had voted for more personal wealth. Real change will have to come, and a nuke
event may well
trigger the real change beyond "defense" spending/policy.
Around the world Bush (and his bro,
Tony Blair) is commonly seen as
bad, but that's not the point of a peace movement. It does not
help my case that it's a systemic, not a symptomatic, problem we are dealing
with, when Bush is pushing nukes big time. He is fueling the worldwide
arms race, benefiting his cronies, but the U.S. has been the biggest arms supplier anyway for several
decades. Building nuclear power plants means weapons
production because of the byproducts of nuclear energy production.
Citizens have not acknowledged the nuclear event of depleted uranium weapons which have
hit Iraqis as well as Americans, because this phenomenon was not a spectacular visible
disaster. Billions of years is depleted uranium's lasting harm. Some
nuclear waste and radiation diminishes relatively fast, but most nuclear waste
is mind boggling: plutonium is the harshest, deadliest material ever
made, with a half-life of 240,000 years. Nuclear waste keeps piling up, as
if the Earth has unlimited space and healing capability.
Bush & co. want more nuclear
weapons and nuclear power plants. Strategic Command in Nebraska is holding
a weapons confab trying to make nuclear weapons more conventional and
acceptable.
Nuke programs of all kinds are quite profitable for
the Establishment, especially as the programs are subsidized by the
taxpayers. But they will stop when the dominant "vision" of
death, fear and greed is rejected by enough masses of people.
Even with devastating consequences to
economic growth, people can purposefully stop buying new energy-wasting gadgets, cars,
etc. Waiting until the economy will crash or the oil runs dry may be reasonable, but that can mean a loss of precious time, when "Genghis
Khan is
marching up your driveway." So it's time to wage peace in our daily
lives vis-à-vis the planet.
To justify nuclear energy because it
does not emit greenhouse gases the way fossil-fueled power plants do is like
switching poisons because it's better to destroy your intestines than your
stomach. Nukes depend on mining uranium (a dwindling resource) which uses
so much energy in the overall effort that by the time the nuke energy is available, the
net energy is not worth it. More importantly, we do not actually need the energy
from either form of power. This leap in logic requires questioning
material progress and looking at the math of how many humans can survive in a
finite world. It ought to be controlling that native American lands
contain uranium, and the poisoning of mining and exploitation must be
terminated.
Nuclear power plants in France and
Germany in early August had to be powered down and sprayed with water because of
the heat wave ravaging the continent. I leave it to you to remark on the
ironies.
We lived for two million
years as a species without risking the destruction of our world, nor needing
beaucoup exomatic energy. But the brainwashed/propagandized reaction to that
idea is something like, "now we are civilized" and "we can't go back to living in caves
or in teepees." If nukes come with civilization, I'd prefer to pass on it.
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