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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.
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