Nuclear Weapons Speech

Two days ago I was at an anti-nuclear-weapons event, with powerful speakers, poetry, and music. I gave a speech on the outlook of my generation on nuclear weapons; I also talk about climate change. The speech is posted at Massachusetts Peace Action's website (http://masspeaceaction.org/8156), but I have reposted most of the text here too. I think it went well.

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I'm generally known at school as the kid who rants about politics. There’s not a huge amount of competition for that title, actually.

I grew up hearing my parents go on about the Bush administration and climate change, and so I learned to rant about those, too. Nuclear weapons did not have much of a presence in my political landscape–as a kid, I associated the word “atomic” with ski brands, not devastating weaponry. Then in ninth grade, I began to learn more about nuclear weapons–to learn that nuclear weapons, rather than a sidenote from cold war history, are the other most pressing and alarming threat to our world, along with climate change.

The two are actually quite similar, both in nature and in the way the government acts towards these threats. But especially for people my age, climate change is the one we’ll know more, or anything, about.

Like climate change, nuclear weapons are a threat that many people are able and comfortable to put out of their mind, deny, or downplay the dangers of. They are slow-moving problems, almost invisible until they’re not. But instead of learning from the suffering of people who’ve already experienced their impacts, we barge onward with the nuclear equivalent of business as usual: igniting tensions with Russia, flexing our nuclear muscles, threatening war. We can talk the talk about wishing the world were nuke-free, but if we don’t act to make it so, we can’t expect anyone else to either. Which is convenient, if you happen to be a defense contractor; if you happen to be a teenager who doesn’t like to imagine what her house would look like as a bomb crater, it’s not so convenient.

Also like climate change, the political discourse and course of action on nuclear weapons is riddled with hypocrisy and inaction–or, if action is taken, it’s the bad kind. Obama claims he’ll take action on climate change while supporting dangerous options like fracking, nuclear power, and permitting Shell to engage in arctic drilling–even while he makes speeches on the gravity of the climate situation in the rapidly melting arctic. Similarly, with nuclear weapons, he pledges to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons, while spending a trillion dollars to modernize, not downsize, the stockpile we already have.

To my generation, when and if we think about it, climate change is a pressing threat. we are the next generations that will inherit this ruined earth and deal with the fallout. But nuclear weapons can’t be shunted to a next generation who will be left to worry about them–they are all of our problem, all of the time. The threat they pose did not end with the Cold War, but since my generation has not grown up under their shadow, we don’t really feel the destruction they threaten as so imminent. We aren’t denying that they’re a threat–we simply hardly know it’s there. That gulf of ignorance, at least, should be something we can–and need to–overcome. How can we be alert and involved, after all, if we’re not informed?

I can say that all my life I’ve grown up in fear of the future. I see the world becoming more and more volatile, and all around me people either wring their hands or close their eyes. But the wait-out-the-storm approach won’t help when our apathy itself worsens that storm. Kids my age tell me “I hate politics,” and I tell them, so do I–the world is depressing and infuriating and terrifying. But you can’t live in apathy just because the world looks prettier from there. Nothing will change if you don’t make it. Instead, trillions will keep being spent to fortify a structure that has no place in it for most of us, no place for the safe and sustainable ways of living we might otherwise build. We are not lacking in human resources. We are the future, and if we are the movement, we have to move. If we’re going to fight climate change, we can’t forget about one of the most potent antagonists of the earth–nuclear weapons. We have to take back our world, people my age must take back our future, and  organize it according to our needs–our need to live, not on borrowed time, not to the rhythm of ticking time bombs.

Dispatches From a Public School System Within a Privilege Bubble

However inconvenient it may be, however immature or shallow we may be seen as, today’s teenagers are the rising generation, standing on the cusp of the world we will inherit. We are the future. Provided that everyone else shapes up enough to make it possible for our lives to go on, it will be our responsibility to live precariously and deliberately, doing as little damage and undoing as much as possible. We are inheriting a cataclysm: the climate crisis, a volatile and splintering world plunging ever farther into war and chaos, eroding liberties and rights, nuclear arms on hair-trigger alert. On our shoulders will be the heaviest burdens of any generation. More is being asked of us than we can imagine.

But in my experience, the institutions that should be guiding and preparing us for what is really out there are instead programming us to react like trained seals, to balance on our noses the balls of standardized testing and whitewashed, watered-down US history, and the everyday inanity of attendance and dress codes. Our public schools are not safe places, and they are not teaching us all we need to learn. Kids are bullied and tormented and forgotten while the schools preach murky and toothless anti-bullying codes. Kids are taught to glorify and nostalgize what we once were, as if the present were a lost cause and the future nonexistent. We are taught to sit still and swallow information, keep it down just long enough to regurgitate it for standardized tests. We are fill-in-the-bubble children, prefabricated for a world far less predictable than we are being readied for.

The teachers are not by default the problem. I have had wonderful teachers, in both public and private schools (currently I am at a public one), who bucked their status of cogs in the machine and tried to teach us more than how to receive the demanded As or check marks. Teachers who taught about kindness, history as it really was, current events as they are. The teachers, on the whole, are not the problem, or at least, not the enemy. The enemy is the system that locks them into delivering the sort of worthless, classist, irrelevant education that will leave us unfit to handle the future for which we are the last chance. The fight for our planet and ourselves begins far before we enter the working world or even college. We cannot afford to put it off until after the SATs, after we can vote, after we have a college degree. Why do we delay the time when we will have to really think? We don’t need the badges of perfect show ponies in order to fight for our rights, our world, our fellow people, and our future.

High school students are in a particularly strange and claustrophobic cage. We are told to be responsible, to act like adults while we are treated like children--except, of course, in scenarios like the school-to-prison pipeline, in which kids are not treated like children, but like dangers to the public or public image that had better be kept out of sight and mind. My town, mind you, doesn’t devote much time to thinking about school-to-prison pipelines. Instead, we (and I use “we” as a general term; I’m well aware that not everyone here fits these stereotypes) are concerned about spending the summer “getting blonder.” We trade tips on how to get cheaper and lower-calorie frappucinos, and when asked on Facebook what their greatest struggles are, two girls responded that it’s that their dogs poop in the house. These are a few of the most incredulous snapshots from the inner workings of the privilege bubble.

In my town, we have been coddled and swept along almost since birth, groomed to always be one step ahead of the masses of this country--not the mention the world--who aren’t upper-middle-class. People move to my town explicitly for the school system, which is supposed to be excellent, and I agree: these schools are excellent at filling our minds with what the government or the textbook corporations think we ought to know. It is a school system from and for a specific social stratosphere, and it is excellent at churning out shiny graduates ready for a shiny career path. We pay thousands of dollars for expensive preschools, private tutors, music lessons, extracurriculars and sports, and then it’s on to high school, with SAT prep courses and summer programs at various name-brand colleges. The inequality gap starts before we are born, and the privilege bubbles only grow thicker over time, so that by the time we get to high school and are simperingly encouraged to “think for ourselves,” we don’t even know how to start.

In a recent assembly at my school, the contradictions were clear as they promised us that junior year won’t really be as bad as rumored, and that if we are very smart and responsible, we will make it through just fine. We traded eye rolls and sighs--we know how it works by now. Of course we can make it through fine, if we toe the line and play by the rules. And sure, maybe if we also give up sleep and stress ourselves past the breaking point. We won’t really be fine at the end--we’ll be worn down and confused and we’ll have no idea what we like to do or who we are, because all we know is how to do the repetitive, mindless tasks of the status quo really well. We are treated like high-performance machines with the on-paper intelligence of college kids and the individual intelligence of five-year-olds. We are not allowed to be in the hallways while classes are ongoing because there is “no supervision,” they tell us--scant moments after they’ve reminded us of the ubiquitous security cameras. We are educated in a police state, with surveillance cameras and armed, uniformed policemen patrolling the halls, but that isn’t enough supervision or intimidation to trust us alone in a hallway.

Next, they flashed the Honda logo on a screen, and a spokesperson walked out to tell us of a new initiative some coalition has cooked up to entice us to perform better in school: students with excellent grades and a strong commitment to the community--however they’ll measure that--will be entered to win prizes and possibly even a Honda car. Let me repeat: to encourage us to learn, we are being sold off to corporations that incentivize us to do well in school by offering us cars. Besides the obvious elitism and general ridiculousness, monetary incentives have been shown to have no effect on academic performance. What programs like this Honda-sponsored one do, instead, is entrench us ever more deeply into the mindset that the reason we should excel in school is to gain admission to the supposedly happy and desirable highest stratum of our capitalist society, lured by the cars that are supposed to symbolize everything we want and could be entitled to. By doing what? Spouting what we’re supposed to in order to get As, squeezing in volunteer hours to get that “good community citizen” badge, and always toeing the line, always smiling? What world are we being prepared for?

We are being prepared for a world that does not exist, one comprised of white picket fences, McMansions with golf-course lawns, and high walls, outside which there are occasional flickers of suffering people who probably don’t look like most of us. We develop a sickly sympathy for those worse off than us--when we aren’t decrying them for failing to be as smart or as driven as we were. Do we ever have a chance to be otherwise, if we don’t make a concerted effort to see through and beyond the illusion of our town and our schools? Our education is co-opted and sold off, which is counterproductive for our learning but very effective at teaching us the worship of and entitlement to money. We are taught that we can have everything, if only we work hard in the right way. If we fall, there should be money-padded safety nets, but we are not supposed to fall. 

But even in this shiny privilege bubble, where it seems like many of us have everything, we are not happy. We succeed, succeed, succeed, or else we fall through the cracks. We had three suicides in my town two years ago. Some of my friends hate our schools with all their hearts, disgusted, disillusioned, defeated. Some wonder how the hell we’re supposed to pay for college when all around us it’s a chorus of which Ivy Leagues we’ll apply to. Others wonder why we’re supposed to care at all, and wonder if there’s a future for us if we just don’t. Many of my friends struggle with mental health issues. Some are bored to death in lower-level classes because they cannot cope with the anxiety and workload of Honors or AP levels, even though those are the only classes that might ask them to actually think. Meanwhile, those high-level classes are full of people who have learned to play the game well, who are driven, neurotypical, wealthy, and stable enough to overachieve at the level demanded. Many of them aren't there to think or to learn--they are there because they are the sort of people who can succeed in this ableist system. We have learned how to win. We are puzzle pieces that fit. Honors and AP classes do not winnow out the students who are brightest. They winnow out the ones who can best fit in the hamster-wheel framework we have been strapped to. 

We are falling, failed by the scaffolds we’ve been climbing like trained monkeys. This system of elitism, ableism, and maniacal drive to the top has its costs even for those who might seem most comfortably swaddled in it. We are being steered since before we can remember through a system that doesn’t guarantee us anything except the pride of knowing that we succeeded at a game it would never have been conscionable for us to fail, because we were given everything and born into social strata that the majority of the population would only imagine. (I don’t think my town is actually the 1 percent, for the most part, but certainly comfortable middle-class, maybe top 10 or 15 percent.) And so even when we fall, we are carted to expensive therapists who try to fathom the psyche of these privileged failures. But we are not failures, and neither are we successes. 

We are casualties of this educational system, whether we win or lose. 

We will walk the plank with GPAs and SAT, PSAT, ACT and MCAS scores swimming before our eyes, wearing Abercrombie and Free People clothes as we meet the fate that isn’t nearly as pretty as we are led to believe. (Free People is an irony I do love, for probably neither the people who manufacture those clothes nor those who wear them are particularly free. Different ends of the class and global power spectrum, living in different cages to perpetuate the same shiny lie.)

But despite what feels like the no-exit speedway of privilege, we were born with agency. Privileges are tools. We have had that agency stifled and channeled towards top grades and most-accomplished-sheep awards, but in our hands is still power. We could be listened to, if we spoke. We could be respected, if we demanded it. That is our privilege. We have the benefit of the doubt in a conflict situation, we have the resources we will need, and we have the opportunities to change things. We can’t have a top-down revolution from the upper strata of privilege, but we can and must be present and active in one. In our hands are useful tools and knowledge, if we realized it. Our education system is not training us to be revolutionaries, but we are not lost unless we let ourselves be. We can step back and breathe, surround ourselves with people we care about and remember to observe the small, irrelevantly beautiful things--skies, trees, shadows, random strangers who smile or nod at you. We can extract the valuable things from our educational experience. We can educate ourselves and each other--we have so much information at our fingertips; there is no need to wait to be spoon-fed. We can break free. We can realize there is more than this competition, these glittery assemblies and pep talks, this mistrust and patronization and obsessive security, these capitalist bribes and fast track to another shiny bubble.

Last year, while all the seniors fretted over college and SATs and whatnot, one friend of mine calmly said he wasn’t planning on college just yet. When asked what he was going to do next year, he’d say easily, “I don’t know.” He’s now working at a local restaurant, saving money to go to Ireland and reevaluate from there, wandering and figuring out what he wants to do. He defied all our town’s expectations and is one of the most intelligent, happy, and free people I know. That is possible for more of us. We don’t have to be what they want or expect. We don’t have to be what we expect, either.

There is more to our lives than what we are taught and sold. We do not need to be offered cars in order to want to learn, to do well not necessarily in school but in learning. That phrase “do well in school” deserves a new translation, a stripping away of the layers of overachieving and competition and elite expectation that it has become shrouded in. To do well in school is not contingent on the number of As on your report card. Why not count the number of hours spent in therapy for the stress we put ourselves under? Why not count the number of books we read and hours of free time we have, in order to judge how well we’re doing? Why not cultivate the breadth of our imaginations and allow us to develop opinions based on experience, and to experience the world for a reason other than to add it to our college applications? We must learn and remember to think, not just on demand within a prefab rubric. We can take that car we’re offered, hop in, and get the hell out of here.