Welcome, Children

 

Welcome, children, to the world we so-called adults are handing over to you—a planetary culture of lies and power. The greater the power, the bigger the lie. The Russian lie that a “special military operation” is not a war, and the Ukrainians brought this on themselves. The Chinese lie that the Uyghurs are being well cared for in education camps. The American lies that Trump actually won re-election, or that the Congress is helpless to do anything about school massacres. And maybe the biggest lie of all, that real security can come from having more world-destroying weapons than the other guy.

 

American children, welcome to the shame of a country that, outrageously, requires you to endure lock-down drills against a random lottery of death for the sake of Second Amendment “freedom.” Those in power fanatically deny the root cause of massacres, which is, obviously, the sheer number and availability of guns in our country—400 million of them. Welcome to a culture that is beyond embarrassing in its hypocrisy, that fusses and fumes over the rights of fetal life but is apparently indifferent to your safety in the classroom. Where an infantile ex-president panders to the NRA by nattering on about mental illness when he himself is in dire need of intervention for pathological narcissism.

 

Children, your classmates keep dying because the pretty obvious 18^th century meaning of the Second Amendment has been grossly perverted by that NRA, accommodated by empty suits like Messrs. Cruz and McConnell along with empty robes like judges Scalia and Thomas and Alito.

 

21^st century gun safety is surely not that difficult. Adults wishing to exercise their privilege to possess a gun need a kind of training similar to what the law requires to license, register, insure and drive a car. Potential gun owners need to be run through an instant national background check, including at gun fairs, and wait 48 hours, and if no red flags come up, they can present documents that confirm that they have had safety training, and then properly register their gun—as long as it’s a civilian and not a military weapon. It is now technically feasible to render a gun unusable without its sensing a particular fingerprint, just as we each have unique keys to our car. These reasonable hoops are a minor inconvenience and not some slippery slope toward the moment they come to take our guns.

 

Children, sorry to let you in on a disconcerting aspect of adulthood: violent power, unaccountable power, leads to lies on every level, such as: a good guy with a gun is the best antidote to a bad guy with a gun—or a good guy with a nuclear weapon is the best antidote to a bad guy with a nuclear weapon. Back in the 1950s when I was a child, we practiced “duck and cover,” an insult to our budding intelligence, supposedly protective against a nuclear explosion, but just as disheartening as your lockdown drills. If we do not change direction on this planet, what is coming will make Uvalde look like a garden party. Those experts who say that safety lies in having more weapons than our adversaries forget that there are already more than enough weapons to destroy life on earth, just as the glut of assault weapons in the U.S. is enough to kill every schoolchild.

 

We can do better on every level. But only when power becomes accountable, and that is up to all of us, those who have the privilege of voting and those who act courageously and resourcefully even without the vote, like the Russians who risk jail to protest a dirty war. You yourselves have demonstrated that resourcefulness, such as when Miah Cerrillo, an 11 year old survivor of the Uvalde massacre, smeared blood on herself, played dead, and dialed 911 for help. Her fear did not paralyze her the way it paralyzes too many hapless politicians. Or Zander Moricz, the gay president of his high school class, who gracefully sidestepped his principle’s ham-handed efforts to censor his use of the word “gay” by talking instead in his graduation speech about learning to feel pride in his curly hair.

 

Children, we are part of a great contest, but it is not the war that so many politicians and nuclear strategy experts and arms manufacturers tell you we are fighting. We are in a world war against violence and monetized hate and unaccountable power, power that rationalizes any lie to justify itself.

 

A big part of winning this war for truth and accountability is our willingness to see in ourselves what we criticize in others. We are all human and imperfect. When we admit this, our hearts expand enough to feel pity not only for all the dead children, whether in Uvalde or Mariupol, but even for the powerful who may never know the joys of servant leadership, of making a positive difference in the lives of their constituents.

 

Too many of us hate our enemies more than we love our children. That fear helps create a planetary culture of bullies who are obsessed with obtaining the kind of total control that puts them above accountability, even if it means indifference to the massacre of the innocent, by assault rifle or artillery or nuclear bomb. It is not a sign of weakness to sit down with others, even others with very different views, to look searchingly together at what is our true and shared self-interest. When we do, we can move beyond empty posturing and begin to see how we might make the world a safer place for children—at least a world that permits children to live to be adults.

Humility

 

 

Humility is endless. —T.S. Eliot

 

Winslow Myers

 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared that he wants Russia weakened. Of course he meant militarily weakened. Still, his words summoned an echo of Versailles in 1918, when the complete humiliation of Germany planted the seeds for the next world war. Unlike 1918, we inhabit a nuclear world, where humiliating other nuclear nations may be infinitely more dangerous.

 

Putin has done criminal harm on a colossal scale. But Putin and his minions are not all of Russia. I have had friendly Zoom conversations with Russians who are just as interested in peace and representative government as we are. While Putin seems to be far from interested in democracy, it is hard to imagine that he is not interested in avoiding nuclear war.

 

Sharing that interest with Putin means staying humble about our own faults and refusing simplistic good guy versus bad guy scenarios. There are no good and bad nuclear weapons. Everyone is human and fallible. Preventing escalation requires confronting Putin’s arrogance without humiliating him, even as he fails to humiliate Ukraine.

 

It is humbling to admit how much the U.S. and Russia share in common. First, those in power in our own country have launched their own imperialist wars with murky motives against Vietnam, Iraq, and others going back into our distant past.

 

Second, accountability. The Russian state does not hesitate to poison or murder its critics without consequence. But the U.S. also has a systemic accountability problem. Our police too often get away with racist murder. The richest among us find ways of paying no taxes at all. No politician has been made accountable for the costs and consequences of war and torture. Our previous president seems to possess an impenetrable Teflon coating that repels all attempts at legal accountability for corruption.

 

Third, the U.S. and Russia share delusion and nostalgia, including the delusion that endless arms races will bring us the security we long for. Putin is soaked in grievance about the breakup of the Soviet Union and thrives on delusions of restoring Russia to 17^th century glory. He has tried to keep his citizens in a state of delusion about the invasion of Ukraine.

 

America too suffers from nostalgic delusion. Vast numbers of our citizens, encouraged by politicians eager to ride to power on the whirlwinds of deception, believe nonsense about voter fraud. Anti-scientific Covid misinformation has led to numbers of deaths higher than any other nation.

 

Too many white Christians, threatened by inevitable demographic change, long for a version of national greatness that never was, again encouraged by politicians and commentators who have mainstreamed formerly extremist racist ideas.

 

No national culture, whether in Russia or America or China or anywhere can thrive if it bases its religious or political principles in fear, lies and exclusion. Just as many in Russia may be accepting Putin’s delusion that Ukrainians are all Nazis worthy of extermination, many in the U.S. along with their supposed political representatives have bought into delusions of conspiracy because they have felt threatened and humiliated by unaccountably rapid economic and cultural change.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court clings to nostalgic interpretations of a Constitution that was conceived in a different world. The framers would recoil at the Court’s definition of money as speech, or if they could see how a gross distortion of the meaning of a well-regulated militia and the right to bear arms has resulted in a nation awash in 400 million guns where mass killings are routine. If Democrats and Republicans stereotyped each other to the extent that those guns were used to resolve our cultural differences, it would make Ukraine look like a picnic.

 

American and Russian military arrogance were equally humbled in Afghanistan. Whoever “wins” in Ukraine, there will be no genuine victory. War between nations is really civil war. Besides the harm to the Ukrainian people themselves, the war has caused a global food crisis, because so many nations depend upon the bounty of Ukrainian agriculture. Our real challenges, like preventing nuclear apocalypse and sustaining the biosystem that supports us, transcend both the quarrels of nations and the quarrels within them.

 

National pride has strengthened the arm of Ukrainian resistance. But as Teilhard de Chardin asserted, “the Age of Nations is past. It remains to us now, if we do not wish to perish, to set aside ancient prejudices and build the earth.”

 

We—we the planet—are between an old unworkable story and an emerging one. In the old story, nature is a resource to be exploited in support of economic prosperity dependent upon an illusory model of infinite natural resources, and both nature and other humans are best controlled according to the principle of might makes right.

 

In a possible emerging planetary story, we have the chance to see that we have more in common than what divides us, based in the challenges we face together. Tanks, fighter jets and nuclear missiles—and the greed, hatred and paranoia motivating their endless deployment—do nothing to address the death of coral reefs, the breakdown of ocean ecosystems and fisheries, the rise in sea levels, the mass migrations of refugees.

 

Because our global situation transcends “us and them,” there’s a relationship between the opposites of humility and humiliation. Keeping our own faults in mind, we can avoid the arrogant temptation to humiliate the Russian nation. Both we and they are in need of radical self-examination. The U.S. may be alienated from Russia at the moment, but we still need to join each other as soon as we can in both disarmament and ecological initiatives. Our very lives depend on it.

 

 

 

Beyond Our Nuclear March of Folly

The planet and its national and international institutions are not even close to facing the realities that confront us. Instead, we live in a fantasy la-la land, or what Greta Thunberg might call blah-blah land. No one is more insanely deluded than Vladimir Putin, who launched a horrific and unnecessary war in which he could unilaterally decide to use nuclear weapons at any moment, based in grievance and an obsolete nostalgia for empire.

 

Real men and women in touch with the actual do not kill children. This reality includes growing tendencies toward autocratic rule. Dictators, some possessing nuclear weapons, try to distract their citizens from loss of freedom by externalizing enemies. We rely upon a security system based in nuclear deterrence, which can break down at any time intentionally or inadvertently. And we face a host of challenges like the global climate emergency, resolvable only by a new level of transnational cooperation. Wars between nations are not only sublimely irrelevant to these realities but tragic setbacks to forward motion. India is experiencing killer heat waves, giving us a sense of what is coming if we fail to get our act together. In Siberia the frozen tundra is thawing, releasing large quantities of methane. Surely that would be a more relevant focus for Mr. Putin’s attention.

 

Even as wars drag on in Ukraine or Yemen or Sudan and too many other places, we can either go the fatalistic route and say thank God we have nukes to keep dictators from doing even worse things, even as we continue to rely weapons that will almost inevitably do us in somewhere down the time-stream unless we change—or we can think of deterrence as a bridge across to new thinking that leads to moving beyond the nuclear age.

 

The nine nuclear countries spend trillions on weapons based on the illusory premise that only if everyone has them will they never be used. But we refuse to spend a tiny fraction of that amount on a permanent conference of high-level officials that can talk through the insanity of the present system and brainstorm together how to get beyond it. How much does the deterrence system itself heighten tensions between nuclear superpowers? Can national leaders be made to see how much it is in their interest to forge treaties that begin a verifiable cycle of nuclear weapons reduction? The conference should include those countries who don’t have nuclear weapons but would like to, and also those countries who agree already that nuclear weapons are worse to have than not have. As one step, the United Nations Treat on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons awaits the first signer from among the nine nuclear powers.

 

A Roman general once said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” In the nuclear age, if we want peace, we have no choice but to prepare preventively for peace. That requires building agreement about fundamental principles across diverse political systems.

 

The global internet so far has been something of a double-edged sword. While it spreads hate and misinformation, it also can help build a shared vision based in truth. There’s enormous potential in the networks that are linking across the world, neurons connecting a kind of global brain that can share scientific knowledge and creative solutions applicable in many locations. This sharing might even, someday, become more powerful than national governments, because it will amplify all that humans have in common, transcending the ginned-up enemy stereotypes that are authoritarian nationalism’s stock-in-trade. Truth will always manage to eventually sneak past their filters.

 

A few big truths remain a good starting point for building agreement: We have much more in common than what separates us. We share a single planet and single life-support system, a common evolutionary history, a collective wish to leave our children a better life than ours, and an interdependent future where our survival depends upon each other. We see this interdependence of survival most acutely in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But even when these are unbuilt, interdependence between humans and between humans and the biosphere will remain our inescapable condition—a reality upon which to build a more workable international security regime.