More Unites Us Than Divides Us

 

 

This summer my daughter and I had the privilege of running the entire Grand Canyon of the Colorado from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. There were thirty people on our two rafts, many from states like Texas and Oklahoma. We were looking forward to evening campsite conversations with citizens holding political convictions different from our own.

 

The conversations never happened. A few offhand remarks quickly made it clear who thought the presidential election of 2020 had been stolen and who believed it had a legitimate winner and loser. By tacit agreement any discussion of religion or politics became a threat to the relaxed vibe of the river experience. And so we lost an opportunity for dialogue across our political divide, in the perfect setting of a national park owned in common by all citizens—improbably high cliffs of rosy stone, two hundred dizzying rapids, and the Milky Way sprinkled across the blackness of the night sky.

 

The sour mutual contempt poisoning our national media has shed a lot of heat but not much light. The easiest way to monetize the airwaves seems to be a variation on the old “if it bleeds it leads”: if there’s hating, high ratings.

 

Some of our differences are real and deep—equality and accountability under the law come to mind, or what truths are self-evident, or abortion, though even that complex issue has been used by demagogues to stir up potential voters.

 

Other issues seem downright manufactured: are teachers really bent upon “grooming” children or making them feel guilty about our difficult history of racism? Mr. LePage was absolutely right when he said that teachers should teach children how to think and not what to think—99.9% of teachers in Maine or anywhere else would surely agree.

 

Whatever our differences, mutual contempt will not help us resolve them. It’s only a short few steps down from that contempt to something infinitely more dangerous: dehumanization, where we assume that the only solution to our conflicts is to eliminate the opposition outright. History has shown us the black hole that lies down that road.

 

No Republican or Democrat is less than fully human. In America or in Lincoln County, we will only prosper together. Conflicts between values can only be resolved by never-ending reasoned debate.

A typical conflict between two positive values which is both local and national involves preserving the commons on the one hand and keeping the tax base robust on the other. At one extreme land is removed from the tax rolls to the point where community necessities like schools can become insupportable. At the other extreme we could lose the precious commons that is one of the primary reasons we choose to live here. There is no clear resolution, only ongoing attempts at balance.

 

What gets lost in reflexive contempt for those with whom we disagree is the value of really listening to opposing points of view, which can lead to more inclusive solutions. Dialogue between those who disagree, like democracy itself, is worth the risk and hard work to keep it going and keep it civil. The civil resolution of conflict is just as foundational to a working democracy as the vote. We are seeing the alternatives in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and far too many other places. They aren’t pretty.

 

We may not be as far apart as we think. Using a model tested by Chloe Maxmin, we knocked on doors of Republicans in our town and simply listened to people’s concerns. Even if we heard things with which we deeply disagreed, we were always treated with friendly good will.

 

But it also sometimes seems as if politics occupies far too much of our mental landscape. Even before the mid-terms, we are already deep in into the presidential sweepstakes of 2024.

 

As the threat of Covid diminishes, perhaps there will be opportunities in Lincoln County not only for conversations across party lines, but even robust civil debate. Maybe we should care less about who might “win” such encounters and more about how they could strengthen the bonds of community as we get to know one another post-Covid and, hopefully, post-polarization. Imagine a chicken barbeque or lobster bake where Democrats and Republicans met together in celebration of civic engagement and the privilege of living in such a beautiful corner of our small planet.

 

 

 

War Is Obsolete

 

“We have communicated directly, privately and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the US and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail,”— Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor.

 

Here we are again, possibly as close to a possible nuclear war in which everyone will lose and no one will win as we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis a half century ago. A half century! And still the international community, including dictators, has not come to its senses around the unacceptable risk of nuclear weapons.

 

Between then and now, I volunteered for decades with a non-profit called Beyond War. Our mission was educational: to seed into international consciousness that atomic weapons had rendered all war obsolete as a way of resolving international conflict—because any conventional war could potentially go nuclear. Sometime after the happy end of the Cold War, the original effort of Beyond War disbanded, then reconstituted in smaller but still crucial efforts like Beyond War Northwest, based in Oregon, or larger ones like World Beyond War. Such efforts are replicated and extended by millions of organizations around the world that have come to similar conclusions, including big ones like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the Noble Peace Prize.

But all these initiatives and organizations have not been enough to move the international community to act on the truth that war is obsolete, and so, not understanding the urgency and not having tried nearly hard enough, the “family” of nations are at the mercy both of the whims of a brutal self-involved dictator—and of an international system of militaristic security assumptions stuck on stupid.

 

As a thoughtful and smart U.S. Senator wrote to me:

 

“. . . In an ideal world, there would be no need for nuclear weapons, and I support U.S. diplomatic efforts, along with those of our international partners, to limit nuclear proliferation and promote stability across the globe. However, as long as nuclear weapons exist, the potential use of these weapons cannot be ruled out, and the maintenance of a safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent is our best insurance against nuclear catastrophe. . .

 

   “I also believe that maintaining an element of ambiguity in our nuclear employment policy is an important element of deterrence. For example, if a potential adversary believes they have a full understanding of the conditions for our deployment of nuclear weapons, they could be emboldened to conduct catastrophic attacks just short of what they perceive to be the threshold for triggering a U.S. nuclear response. With this in mind, I believe a No First Use policy is not in the best interest of the United States. In fact, I believe it could have significant adverse effects regarding the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as our allies who rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella—notably South Korea and Japan—may seek to develop a nuclear arsenal if they do not believe the U.S. nuclear deterrent can and will protect them from attack. If the U.S. cannot extend deterrence to its allies, we face the serious possibility of a world with more nuclear weapon states.”

 

This can be said to represent establishment thinking in Washington and around the world. The problem is that the Senator’s assumptions lead nowhere beyond the weapons, as if we are trapped forever in the swampland of deterrence. There is no apparent consciousness that, given that the world could end as the result of one misunderstanding or misstep, at least a small portion of our creative energy and immense resources might usefully be spent on thinking through alternatives.

 

The Senator would surely argue from his assumptions that Putin’s threats make this exactly the wrong time to talk about nuclear weapons abolition—like the politicians who can be counted on after yet another mass shooting to say that it is not the moment to talk about gun safety reform.

 

The situation with Putin and Ukraine is classic and can be counted upon to repeat itself in some variation (cf. Taiwan) absent fundamental change. The challenge is educational. Without the clear knowledge that nuclear weapons solve nothing and lead nowhere good, our lizard brains turn again and again to deterrence, which sounds like a civilized word, but in essence we are primitively threatening each other: “One step further and I will come down on you with catastrophic consequences!”

 

Once enough of the world sees the utter futility of this approach to security (as have the 91 nations who, thanks to ICAN’s hard work, have signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons), we can begin to risk the creativity that becomes available beyond deterrence. We can examine the opportunities we have to make gestures that acknowledge the uselessness of the weapons without compromising our “security”(a “security” already utterly compromised by the nuclear deterrence system itself!).

 

For example, the U.S. could afford to stand down its entire land-based missile system, as former Secretary of Defense William Perry has suggested, without any crucial loss of deterrent power. Even if Putin didn’t feel threatened before and was just using his apprehensions about NATO to rationalize his “operation,” he surely feels threatened now. Perhaps it is in the planet’s interest to make him feel less threatened, as one way to prevent Ukraine from the ultimate horror of being nuked.

 

And it’s past time to convene an international conference where representatives of responsible nuclear powers are encouraged to say out loud that the system doesn’t work and leads only in one bad direction—and then begin to sketch the outlines of a different approach. Putin knows as well as anyone that he is in the same trap as the American soldier in Vietnam who said “we had to destroy that village to save it.”

 

Nine Stupid Nations

 

“Stupid” is the most harsh and humiliating adjective that can be flung at a person, let alone a nation-state. What’s the usual response to being called stupid? Nothing positive. We just go into reaction and resistance.

 

I’m sorry, but there is no other word to describe the obstinate refusal of the nuclear powers to cooperate to dismantle their nuclear arsenals at the same time the climate emergency sweeps across the world.

 

According to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2021 the nine nuclear nations spent a total of $82.4 billion on their nuclear programs—$156,841 a minute. The ultimate driver of this profligate, irrelevant, dangerous spending turns out to be: profit, shored up by $117 million in lobbying.

 

The major rationale the nations give for keeping their weapons is deterrence. But did they deter Putin from his (stupid!) invasion of Ukraine? They did not. Did they deter 9-11? They did not. And should deterrence break down, as it almost inevitably will unless we change, instead of victory by any one party to conflict, the outcome would at best be nuclear winter that leads to the starvation of most of the world’s population, and at worst a devastation that ends the human experiment altogether. Tolerating such a “security” system surely qualifies as the ultimate stupidity.

 

The United States was the biggest spender on nuclear weapons in 2021: $44.2 billion. It’s as if the left hand of “defense” has no idea of the real threats to our strength and security over on our right hand (dangerous heat waves, anyone?  Thousand year floods? Fires which devour whole towns?).

 

Pakistan is one-third underwater. Yet they spent over a billion dollars on their nukes in 2021. India’s spending was equal to Pakistan’s, even as parts of India become too hot to work outside in daylight. China, Russia, France, Israel, Britain, North Korea—all face daunting climate challenges that are becoming existential threats.

 

Who will be the first nuclear nation to admit this out loud? To make perfectly safe unilateral gestures of good will like openly bringing into port a nuclear submarine or standing down some land-based missiles? To build a political consensus among their constituents that we are on a road to nowhere and must make a major shift? To turn a deaf ear to lobbyists who seductively pretend to represent “security” when in fact they represent omnicide? To convene an international conference toward abolition? Such a conference would be built upon two well-understood principles: A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought; and the planet will not be habitable for our grandchildren unless we smarten up and repurpose that 82 billion a year—and much more—toward solar panels and batteries and wind turbines and geothermal plants—for our common security as a planet. Meanwhile, stupid is as stupid does.

 

The Great Ship

 

The great ship, a thin disc a quarter mile wide, had hovered for a month in geosynchronous orbit over the Earth, invisible, undetectable by any human device. Those on board, citizens from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, were finishing up the observations planned for this particular flyby (these occurred every Earth decade). They gathered on the bridge for a last conference before departure. Through gigantic windows they could view the ethereal blue curve of the planet under their scrutiny.

 

“Never in all our explorations have we observed a more striking opposition between gorgeous beauty and the degree of the trouble this particular planet finds itself in. So tempting to break the solemn rule of the Intergalactic Federation not to intervene.”

 

“Let’s begin with nuclear weapons. Humans are inherently tribal, but the destructive magnitude of their arsenals has raced ahead of their tribal mind-set, accelerating a fear-based “we build/they build” cycle.”

 

“The possibility of nuclear winter has only partially penetrated military strategy, not enough to cause their generals to take a second look at the collective assumption that more is better.”

“The war in Ukraine and the tensions over Taiwan have caused a ratcheting up of polarization, intensifying the illusion that nuclear weapons are the only way to deter attack—where in fact the reality is that deterrence has not prevented aggressions like the terrorist assault on New York City, or the invasion of Ukraine.”

 

“Humans remain blind to the reality that the deterrence system itself could actually become the cause of a war no one can win and no one wants, because they assume deterrence will work perfectly for all time. They refuse to take into account inadvertence, human or computer error, or the confusion when tensions escalate out of control. And so far the nine nuclear powers cannot find a way beyond their fear of letting down their guard. ”

 

“What about the United Nations?”

 

“It has had moments of effectiveness, but the structure of the Security Council is self-cancelling when it comes to the really big issues, on account of the veto muscle of the superpowers.”

 

“Humans participate in millions of non-governmental organizations working toward abolition. One of the most effective is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which is working to get more and more nations to sign on to a total ban through the United Nations Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

 

“The organization with possibly the greatest potential of all to make a difference is something called Rotary. It boasts 1.3 million participants in 33,000 clubs in 172 different nations. Many of their members are business people, with a strong interest in the relationship between peace and economic prosperity. They have the right values and a culture of good will and problem-solving that is consistent across national boundaries. They are effective. If they got behind the U.N. Treaty, pressure would increase on the nine nuclear nations to rethink their policies.”

 

“Let’s pray they rise to the occasion.”