There’s a lot of funny stuff in politics, but the most ludicrous has got to be these holdovers from the 1980s running around warning that we could all die in a nuclear war. The idiots have not realized that nobody cares, that they look like morons, and that they’ll only have seconds in which to point out that they were right. What sort of awards do they expect to be given in the space of a half a minute?
Everybody’s going to be about to die in a matter of seconds. Maybe some people will be in lucky places and have a few minutes. Maybe on the edges of certain areas people will get to writhe in pain for hours. Or if it’s a small nuclear war limited to one part of the world, and other people are doomed to envy the dead while starving to death under a nuclear winter, tell me who is really going to want to be told that a bunch of people we’ve never heard of who look like morons were right all along? Who’s going to even believe they were right all along and didn’t just make up that they’d been screaming the same thing at the top of their lungs for 75 years? Won’t we be too busy saying goodbye to our loved ones? Won’t we actually blame these people who knew what was coming but were so incompetent at screaming for 75 years that we never even heard them? I mean you’d really have to suck at screaming, right?
So, here’s some advice that I offer free of charge to the anti-nukes crowd. Predict things that you can survive. You can even predict climate collapse, but predict it by stages, predict how bad it will get 1 year at a time, see? That way you can take credit and at least have a little clique of weirdos who think you’re awesome.
Or, if you want to do better than that, predict actually admirable things. You’re into nukes, right? So, predict that the stocks of nuke companies are going to soar. It’s not rocket science (get it?) when you just have to buy the stocks that Congress Members tweet that they just bought. Even you nitwits can manage this. If you predict that weapons stocks are going up and you buy them, you will look cool as hell.
You can even predict that sending billions of dollars worth of free weapons to anybody who lives near Russia and hasn’t been censored by Youtube will lead to a need for yet more weapons. Now you start looking genius. Take it from me, almost nobody gets this. You can predict that adding more countries to NATO will mean more weapons, plus more Russian hostility, plus more Russian spending on weapons, which will mean more U.S. spending on weapons, which will mean even more countries in NATO. Are you catching on?
I’m letting you in on what is still pretty much the ground floor here. If this goes the way I think, you can even predict that more NATO expansion is needed because of a coming nuclear war, which is bound to . . . oh god damn piss merde jesus hellraiser christ. OK we’re back where you jackasses started. But only after many weeks of glory and admiration. Think about it.
You’re pretty much just trying to help everyone without any benefit to yourselves. Idiots.
Great song! Too bad it’s so true.
I can see you are having a bad day, David. You know what we need is a way to empower people and direct their energy towards making their government serve the needs of the people and away from mission of endless accrual of power. Just this morning some images of the protests that led Roosevelt to implement the social changes he did crossed my twitter feed. Maybe you saw them too and that is why the image of U2 came to your mind. It would seem that every clarion call has been co-opted and domesticated by the powerful for many years. So no one will get it from hearing from those handsome boys, smiling and dancing while they remind us of doom. Dylan issued the call earlier and at least he didn’t smile (much). It still wasn’t enough.
The majority of today’s population choose between focusing on immediate fears related to health, economics and the other risks that tear apart peoples lives and lead them to feel vulnerable to total loss. or a distant fear of nuclear war which is talked about by our leaders as if it is OK and which has no longer any tangible connection to their lives. Some people are actually looking forward to it because they think they are chosen somehow by ‘God’ to be protected. Talk about idiots!
We old fogies continue on because some of us really remember the situation growing up in the 50s. I saw one of Patrick Lancasters videos from Mariupol where he interviewed some people who had been hiding for more than a month is a Soviet era bomb shelter under a hospital. It resonated with me. We had air raid drills from when I was first in school until Kennedy died. In the school I went to we had to go behind the walls of the building in the basement, crowded together with giant cans of water. It was terrifying. The last air raid drill was called the day of Kennedy’s death. I thought we were doomed for sure because some of the teachers were crying. Since I didn’t want to die behind that wall, I went home only to find out it was another false alarm. Meanwhile, we weren’t afraid of going to the poorhouse or having not food. So it is kind o the opposite of today’s world.
So now we need people to oppose war but they aren’t available. They are distracted. We can’t even bring them to oppose climate catastrophe effectively. A group I belong to wants to have gas rationed. Why? Why piss people off when it’s already an economic reality. Yes we need move to green energy but it goes far beyond that. What we need to do is get corporations to stop pumping out useless plastics and polyester; we need affordable solar panels? Can’t be done quickly? Compare to the trajectory of computer chips from 1960 to the 90s. Instead they are stuck on step 2, Tessla. Time to go back to basics. Time to go back to natural containers and clothes. My brother ran a recycling business on the scrap dock at Rochester Products (GM). He eventually ‘retired early’ when they were getting rid of ‘overpaid’ employees’. But what really devastated him is that they shut down the entire recycling initiative. He was bringing in a million dollars a year but that was not enough for the project to outlast him. They really don’t care. If we want to recycle, fine. But they are not going to contribute.
Speaking of health, today a woman from the County Contact Tracing Office called (because my test was positive). She said that they don’t do contact tracing ‘any more’ but she just wanted to know if I need anything. Since I had a legitimate PCR test it should be clear. But what are the powers that be doing? They are breeding viruses on the Russian Border and inside China along with birds and insects to distribute them. I say that’s potentially as big of a risk as nukes – well to humans, but thankfully maybe not to the rest of the earth. You would think they would have learned something from the COVID experience. But, in the end war is all they know.
Sorry to join you in your frustration. I suppose there is no longer any way to bring all those people to the streets. I’m glad you are aware because you will likely outlast most of us who remember the 50s.
Pink Floyd – Two Suns In The Sunset