A NOTE ABOUT THE FEATURED IMAGE:
AMBER WAVES OF GRAIN. This field of ceramic nose-cones represents, in miniature, all the warheads in the US nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War, along with the nuclear submarines, bombers, and ballistic missiles designed to deliver them. Estimates put the warhead count at around 25,000. Denver sculptress Barbara Donachy created this installation to show what such a concentration of nuclear weaponry would look like all in one place. Her display contains 33,561 pieces representing 31,000 warheads, 1,799 ballistic missiles, 324 intercontinental bombers, and 37 nuclear submarines. Amber Waves of Grain installation by Barbara Donachy, Boston Science Museum, Boston, Massachusetts. February 13, 1985. Photograph copyright by Robert Del Tredici, The Atomic Photographers Guild. From https://thebulletin.org/2021/07/will-canada-remain-a-credible-nonproliferation-partner/
The end is ever so fucking nigh, if there ever was a time to join a doomsday cult, NOW is the right time, I don’t blame anyone for getting seduced down that path, I know how tempting safety is, and how disgusting our desperation to find it is, it makes me blind to everything else, that throbbing, vicious need to obliterate this feeling – panic mounting me at both sides I don’t know where to turn, I’ve been flanked, sighted, targeted and why not, I’ve given them all everything, haven’t I? My fingerprints and my face, the war we are waging don’t even have humans pulling triggers anymore, it’s just all AI.
Yet everyone seems so calm.
And the world goes on.
And I go to work and speak with mothers of daughters dying of lung cancer, who refuse to give them the hydromorphone they need because they’re so afraid of having addicts for children. And it’s so automatic, this spiel I go into, like an instinct born inside of me just waiting to be released, it comes out of me so easily, in smooth calming waves, and I tell them, like a fucking sales pitch, the principle of double effect – how I wish I could cry the tears they’re keeping inside, think the thoughts they’re trying to distance themselves from, hold their hands and walk them through this cognitive dissonance – the whole point of palliative care is comfort, we treat for pain, nothing else, even if death is what comes after this dose, sometimes it’s the best option, yes, even though she’s only 7, and haven’t lived, we must accept this, somehow, we must accept it. That’s the principle of double effect, in its essence, in its bare, raw, unflinching truth – an ugliness, like a fist wrapped in blood.
She can’t be addicted because she is dying, let her die without pain, please. But how? How to open up our minds to this painful truth and still somehow remain sane and live out the rest of our lives, I’m not sure. I don’t have answers for this. I can’t blame the people who turn off their TVs not wanting to hear why exactly we’re destroying Iran and Cuba and Venezuela and the rest of the world. Maybe every generation feels like they’re the last. Perhaps this is what it felt like living during the Cold War. In 1967, at the peak of the Cold War, the United States had 31,255 nuclear warheads. That’s just 4,603 above the poverty line, at least in Ontario. Why did they have so many? We only really need one. I suppose the MAD doctrine is a strong motivator.
They say it only takes 72 minutes to wipe out the world as we know it in the event of a nuclear war. And one button to cause it all – currently at the hands of an unstable mad man with no guard rails keeping him in check. One bruised ego, one bad day, one fatal drink.
How much longer, I wonder, do we keep our eyes and ears closed, before we’re forced to face the repercussion of our own inaction? Whose rage can we fuel to change the tide and spark a movement? Whose death do we have to martyr above the rest before the majority of us, accept indoctrination to radicalization?
I’m counting down the minutes. And I can’t fucking wait for it.
Leave a Reply