A World Before (And After) Nuclear Weapons

I wonder how it must have felt to live before the invention of nuclear weapons. When whatever horror we might imagine befalling the world would not be the ultimate horror. A world where even if such an evil as Hitler existed, his potential for destruction was limited. People knew that there would be an end to the horrors of whatever war they were living through eventually, and that more normal times would someday return, be it in a year or a hundred. That even if it felt like their world was ending, it wasn’t THE end.

My parents were born into such a world, although that world ended long before they met each other. As for me, a world where humanity could destroy itself and most every other species was the only world I’ve ever known. I wasn’t part of the duck and cover generation, thank God. Nor was I around when my mother gathered my other siblings to pray against the world’s ending during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I was part of The Day After generation. Our teachers instructed us to watch it when it was broadcast on television. And we were shown footage of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school. There seemed to be a lot of footage available, most of it still burned into my memory.

I wonder if they show that to children today. I wonder if it still has the same effect on children that it did on me. I can’t help the feeling that we’ve normalized the threat, or that the black and white images can’t convey to jaded eyes what it did to a child who remembered his family getting their first colored TV. Perhaps we’ve come to accept the nuclear destruction or environmental destruction of our planet as an inevitability. Like everything else in our lives, we sit on the couch and watch the world happen. We’ve become spectators to all that transpires on Earth, and our only impact on it all is to cheer or boo.

We’ve become helpless, like children. But unlike children, we can’t pretend we are innocent. Nor do we have the luxury to believe we are powerless. We, humanity, have the power to destroy the world. We have to accept that we have the power to save it.

Yet we remain silent. And by remaining silent, we remain complicit. We cannot claim innocence or helplessness because there are some crimes so heinous, so unspeakable, that to remain quiet and do nothing is itself a sin. We are all party to potential — perhaps inevitable — genocide and ecocide.

Helplessness is not an option you can consider. You must speak loudly the words of the wise ones of our species against the chatter of the mindless monkeys. You must speak from all the health and rightness in you against the twisted souls who wish to rule and will ultimately destroy. You must demand more options than the ones they present to you. You must demand that mature peace and mature love finally be brought to fruition. Not later. Now.

Stop looking outside for someone to blame and look inside to see the answers that are there.

Stop looking for some lesser-hell alternative and face the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the only alternative to hell is heaven.

I wonder if some future generation will be able to live without the fear that has been with us our entire lives. And of course, if they do live with the fear we must contend with, that is still far preferable to the hell we will leave them should our own fears be realized.

If there is any hope to be had for future generations, it rests upon the actions of those living now.