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dalai lama
Breaking Through the Normalcy of Los Alamos on Hiroshima Day
In Los Alamos--a town of 12,000, the second richest county in the USA, with more millionaires and PhD's per capita than practically any other city--it is perfectly normal to build weapons of mass destruction, to spend one's life in the big business of death, to prepare, like any other terrorist training camp, new sinister techniques to commit mass murder on an unprecedented global level. It's also perfectly normal to have cancer because that comes with the job--after so many decades, it's a radioactive waste dump. What job doesn't have its downside?
The normalcy of Los Alamos is so inhumanly, grotesquely, demonically abnormal as to seem perfectly reasonable.
Life is good in Los Alamos, even though the sole purpose of life there is death. One could argue that Los Alamos--where the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, 73 years ago was first built, where tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have been built ever since--is the greatest city of death on the planet.
Los Alamos is end of the world, and it is perfectly normal. As Thomas Merton first wrote to Daniel Berrigan in 1961, when they finally succeed in blowing up the planet, it will be perfectly legal, totally reasonable, and even normal.
"Until we are willing to nonviolently break through the normalcy of death as a social methodology and wake up to the fullness of the nonviolent life, we too remain shell people who have lost our souls to despair, numbness, fear, hatred and death."
Here, all the issues of injustice coalesce into one. This is racism front and center. This is sexism. This is unadulterated greed. This is the fullness of colonialism and imperialism the likes of which the world has never seen. This is full on permanent total warfare. This is torture. This is the global death penalty. This is the murder of all creatures. This is the fullness of environmental destruction, the birthplace of the nuclear winter. All rolled into one. This is the epitome of hatred, stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, blindness, and collective insanity. This is a town for narcissistic sociopaths, modeled after our president. And it's all perfectly legal, reasonable and normal.
The politicians bet their careers on keeping it going. The generals order ever greater weaponry (the race is on behind those locked doors to find something bigger and better than a nuclear bomb!) The mad scientists stoke the fires. The priests and ministers bless the bombs. The faithful do their duty, collect their fat paychecks, and know they are doing God's will. Together, everyone pledges allegiance to their one true god, their ultimate security--the Bomb.
You don't believe me? Go see for yourself.
I think every U.S. peacemaker who cares about our predicament should visit Los Alamos once in her lifetime to witness the depths of the evil we're up against.
Los Alamos is the 1950s sci-fi movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, come to life. Aliens have taken the souls out of everyone; now these shell people walk around like zombies. It's zombie town USA. Sooner or later, they'll get us all.
If this seems a little harsh, I invite you to stand outside the Labs, as we did this weekend, where the end of the world, a global nuclear holocaust, is thoughtfully, professionally, reasonably prepared. If we are willing to allow this to happen, then why not rip immigrant children from their parents, or lock millions up in our gulags, or kill the polar bears and the elephants, or destroy the coral reefs or melt the ice caps or lead drone attacks on kids in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere?
The measure of our consciousness, Gandhi once wrote, is the level of our nonviolence. Until we are willing to nonviolently break through the normalcy of death as a social methodology and wake up to the fullness of the nonviolent life, we too remain shell people who have lost our souls to despair, numbness, fear, hatred and death.
What to do? Some of us have tried to break through the cultural normalcy with nonviolent street theater. Every year, for the last fifteen years, we have gathered in Los Alamos to commemorate Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the green lawn park by Ashley Pond, where those two bombs were originally built. Over the weekend, we prayed, then marched, then put on sackcloth, then poured ashes on the ground, then sat down at the intersection of Oppenheimer Way and Trinity Drive, in thirty minutes of silent prayer, holding our signs ("Shut down Los Alamos!" "Repent of the Mortal Sin of Nuclear Weapons!" "Abolish Nuclear weapons!" and so forth).
Cars and truck drive by honking, but not in support. Police officers watch from their air-conditioned trucks ("Your people are so old, Father John, we're worried that one of them is going to have a heat stroke," one says to me.) It's over 90 degrees, but we sit anyway, taking over the town, saying our NO!, accepting responsibility, and begging for the miracle of nuclear disarmament. We are, to say the least, abnormal.
Afterwards we gather back in the park to hear leading anti-nuclear activists speak about their work and our next steps. I introduce each one, heartened by their tireless dedication, the seemingly impossible task they have set before themselves, and the visionary connections they make between the Labs and racism, poverty, healthcare and environmental destruction.
Our act, I explain, is the oldest known political protest, straight from the Hebrew Bible, from the book of Jonah, where Jonah, a reluctant peace activist, walks through Ninevah, calls the people to repent of their violence, and the whole town dons sackcloth, including the cattle, sits in ashes, and pledges to be nonviolent. Everyone repents, they wake up from their madness, and learn to live in peace happily ever after. It's the only "successful," happy-ending protest in the Bible.
Of course, Nineveh today is the Iraqi town of Mosul, where the United States dropped depleted uranium and killed thousands. Now the cattle give birth to deformed, still born creatures.
As God tries to explain to poor Jonah, "These people don't know their left hand from their right hand." What must the God of peace think of us?
"The solution lies in a global, bottom up, people power, grassroots movements of nonviolence, the likes of which the world has never seen."
If we are to wake up and help one another come to our senses and begin the long haul task of nuclear disarmament, environmental cleanup and right distribution of these trillions of dollars to the world's poor, we need to publicly break through the normalcy of our collective insanity.
My friends and I will be back next year, and are already organizing for August 6 and 9, 2020, the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagaski. I've invited everyone I can think of to come join us, from Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama to Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls (Joan, Amy--will you please come?) Plan now to join us.
The solution lies in a global, bottom up, people power, grassroots movements of nonviolence, the likes of which the world has never seen, way beyond the achievements of Gandhi and Dr. King. I think that is happening across the planet; it's just not being reported by the mainstream media, even by the alternative media.
Regardless, our job is to keep on organizing, taking action and speaking out publicly for disarmament and justice, making the connections, waking one another up, and building that global grassroots movement of nonviolence.
We have to help people see that nuclear disarmament, justice, and environmental protection is what's normal, human, and Godly. Until then, we have to risk being seen as the abnormal ones, sitting at the intersection of Oppenheimer Way and Trinity Drive.
Next month, our group CampaignNonviolence.org will hold its fifth national week of action from Sept. 15-23, with over 2,000 marches and events across the nation, in every state and major city, against war, poverty, racism, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and for the coming of a new culture of peace and nonviolence.
On September 22, we will gather at 9 a.m. at the Dr. King statue in Washington, D.C., for reflections, then march in pairs and silence pass the Lincoln Memorial to the White House for a vigil and nonviolent direct action. (For more details see: www.campaignnonviolence.org). As far as I can tell, it's the first march ever from the Dr. King statue. We want to take a message of justice and disarmament to the White House in a spirit of Kingian nonviolence, and call for new nonviolent solutions, a new culture of nonviolence.
Perhaps some day we might learn the difference between our left hand and our right hand. On that day, we will all learn the wisdom of nonviolence and abolish nuclear weapons and war forever.
Inevitability: Nuclear War is Coming
It could break out at any moment between India and Pakistan, the most likely scenario at present. Pakistan is deploying tactical nuclear weapons controlled by local commanders on the front lines in Kashmir, as if the near-miss of the Cuban crisis of 1962 had never happened. War could almost as likely start between NATO and Russia. It might begin with an accident, a misinterpretation of computer blips, a terrorist act, a careless or calculated overreach by a dictator, or a troubled officer with access to sequestered codes. There are too many weapons of too many sizes connected by too many complex but imperfect electronic systems to too many fallible human beings.
If it happens, all our incremental steps toward a semblance of world order will disappear in a few minutes of unimaginable destruction, to be replaced by a barbaric chaos where medical facilities are overwhelmed and water and food supplies are contaminated. Those still alive at the periphery of the blasts will envy those annihilated at the center.
The effects will be experienced around the world, even from a so-called "regional" war. As the ash and soot and radioactive particles from the detonations rise into the upper atmosphere and disperse upon the winds, we will learn just how small a planet we inhabit together--a lethal lesson with no do-over.
The political fallout will be equally grave and far-reaching. Those leaders who made lukewarm but ineffectual efforts to control the weapons, who paid lip service to non-proliferation treaties, who made high-minded speeches while convinced that disarmament initiatives would mean the end of their electability, will feel a remorse that screams within like the howling mobs that will surround their offices and palaces demanding to know why the leaders let disaster happen.
Not a day goes by that I do not ponder why it has not happened already. However ignored, this issue has hung over our lives like a gray pall. Working to prevent nuclear war has provided invaluable moments of shared hope, but feelings of foreboding have dominated. Morbid preoccupation seems less neurotic than total denial. Anyone who admits the urgency of this issue cringes and waits and wonders when, say, the radio goes temporarily dead--has it finally happened? There's also the magical thinking that says that since it has not yet happened, there may indeed be miraculous hidden forces at work, helping us avoid the worst until we grow mature enough to realize our folly.
History suggests to us that divine intervention will not prevent the worst. It did not stop the Nazi holocaust. Nuclear weapons were conceived and created by people. People are equally capable of realizing that such weapons have not led, and cannot lead, to the global security we seek. It is this logical conclusion, sidestepped and diluted by hundreds of thousands of "experts," but clear enough to the average 10-year-old, that can be the shared basis of universally applied, reciprocal negotiations toward absolute and total abolition. The world would rejoice in relief if it happened.
We have been gifted with the capacity to see. Instead, we are very close to doing ourselves in.Meanwhile we remain stubbornly blind. How much more deeply could we fail our 10-year-olds than by introducing them to a world where such hideous and unmerited suffering hangs over them? The bumper-sticker question persists: do we hate our enemies more than we love our children?
We have kept these weapons at the ready as our primary way to avoid looking at our own darkness. We have projected evil motives upon a series of less-than-fully-human stereotypes, from the toothy, sadistic, slant-eyed Orientals (suddenly transformed back into agonized human beings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), to brutal, corrupt, vodka-swilling Soviets, to bearded, misogynistic Islamic thugs. And the real people behind these crude and false stereotypes have projected the same malevolence onto us. Out of this "us-and-them" animosity has arisen the systemic evil of world-destroying weapons.
Our mutual fear can only be mastered by living the golden rule common to all major religions, of doing as you would wish to be done by. Refusal to heed this practical advice has borne a perverse shadow-version of the universal rule of interdependence: if you do harm unto me, I will destroy you utterly--even if it also destroys me in the process!
We need to see, with the same visceral fright that we respond to a poisonous snake rearing up and baring its dripping fangs, the immediacy of the danger we face.
On this earth the universe has tried an experiment in consciousness, an experiment in learning to see what causal conditions lead to life and what lead to death.
We have been gifted with the capacity to see. Instead, we are very close to doing ourselves in. We ignore the life-affirming realism of Jesus, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King in favor of the illusory "realism" of Kissinger, Cheney, Trump and Cruz. Millions on the planet continue to work their hearts out to wake people up to reasonable alternatives based in common interest and common sense.
May they prove my pessimism wrong.
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