My Instagram feed is full of anger and “the arc of the moral universe bends slow but…”

My Facebook brims with exhortations to focus on the positive, on what we can control, on the next fight.

I live in a poor Democratic stronghold in southeastern Connecticut. Kamala Harris won our state by more than 200,000 votes. Our seven paltry electoral votes went blue. Here, Jill Stein got a lot more votes than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but nowhere near enough to swing the Nutmeg State red.

I didn’t plant a Harris/Walz sign on my front walk. I didn’t knock on doors in Pennsylvania. I didn’t give any money in response to the desperate and constant text messages I received from Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and dozens of other Democratic pen pals. I also never figured out how to stop those texts from crowding onto my phone.

Now that the election — the longest for Donald Trump (he started campaigning and fomenting insurrection even before the White House door whacked him on the bottom in 2021) and the shortest (just 107 days) for Kamala Harris — is over, there’s a small voice in my head asking why I didn’t go in hard for Kamala’s politics of JOY.

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I love joy! I love her laugh! But I also know the answer: 43,000 dead in Gaza didn’t spark joy. Continued shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel didn’t make me happy. For all their good vibes alchemy, the Harris/Walz campaign failed to depart from the Biden administration’s blank check for Benjamin Netanyahu’s version of saturation bombing.

There’s a lot her campaign should have/could have/might have done differently (if they had more time, if they had listened to different strategists) in terms of their ground game, how they spent their money, and who they focused on. There’s already a cottage industry of podcasters, pundits, and policy wonks at work figuring out just how and where the Harris/Walz campaign went wrong. But at the end of the day, of course, she lost because Trump won, because white men, atheist men, born-again men, Catholic men, rich men, poor men, men of all colors voted for him. They embraced his misogyny; his nativism; his racism; his Teflon-Don persona; his tall walls and barbed wire; his hatred of trans kids and gender as a spectrum; and his well-financed, loudly declared, legislatively-wired hatred of just about anyone who isn’t like him. Or maybe, just maybe, they held their noses against that foul hate-fest and voted for him because of some small, single, shining promise that rang out for them amid the cacophony of his raucous, roadshowing campaign. Who knows?

I’m not a pundit, a podcaster, or a policy wonk. I’m not a Democratic Party insider. In fact, I’ve often (but not in 2024) voted Green. I’m a mother of three bright, opinionated kids, two of whom don’t fit neatly into the rigid gender-presentation box now mandated by the Republican leadership. All three of those gorgeous human beings love peace and kindness. They’re friendly and trusting, as well as sharp and capable of sniffing out hypocrisy and equivocation. The day after the election, I sent them off to school with a warm lecture on staying true to our values of kindness and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person — even those who voted for Trump. “No one we know would vote for him,” my son asserted with the confidence of the young. He is incorrect. More than 75 million people in this country voted for him. We certainly know some of them… Some of them are our friends.

I have to keep explaining to my kids why Donald Trump won and what having him at the helm of our government (again) will mean — for the next four years (or forever). It’s not an easy task. But I have to try because I’ve got three reasons not to luxuriate in despair and nihilism. Instead, I have to tap into the power of my imagination to get me through the rough days ahead.

Imagining Our Way Through the Nightmare

They say that we have to imagine a thing before we can make it a reality. The moon shot, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (first imagined almost 20 years before it took place in 1963), robots, nuclear weapons and the anti-nuclear movement (both imagined, however inadequately, before they became realities), solar panels: all were ideas, dreams, or even nightmares first.

Amid my own fracturing in this post-election moment, all the shards of sadness and disappointment, I’ve been seeking out friends and strangers in a structured but informal way. In one community conversation, someone suggested we hold an inauguration un-watch party where we would share our vision for the next four years. I immediately latched onto that bit of wisdom, hoping we might indeed organize such an event with a booming sound system, poetry, pomp, and a podium.

Since that idea was shared, I’ve also been crafting the 47th president’s inauguration speech in my head — not the one he’ll give, of course, but the speech I wish he would make. I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in global warming that any of the words that follow will ever come out of his mouth, but I needed to write them down anyway. Maybe getting them out into the world will give me the energy I need to do my part in bringing such words to life in spite of him. So, here goes:

A Speech for the Ages (All of Them)

My fellow Americans, and all those of you who still look to the United States as a land of opportunity, I, Donald J. Trump, am inaugurating a new era today. I’m stepping down from this post, which I barely won. My whole political career started out as a gag, a gig, a side project in my vast empire of hustle and hucksterism, and here I stand again on Inauguration Day. How wild is that?

Even crazier, this very day, the nation also honors the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And maybe it’s the ghost of that great justice-seeker that’s led me to make a very different speech than I planned or you expected.

I wanted to drain the swamp, but I’m the one who feels drained right now. Ditch diggers the world over will tell you that it’s hard work. I’m exhausted and so, later today, I’m headed home to Mar-a-Lago (or to jail). Before I go, I want to share a few thoughts — one last weave — with all of you. So here are some of the mistakes and missteps I’ve made and the new thoughts I’ve recently been having. 

The Environment: I’m a city guy, a golf-course guy. Nature makes me uncomfortable. It’s too big and I don’t understand it. Once in office, I wanted to smash it, drill it for its riches, and make it smaller. But I’ve rethought that. We should, I now think, protect nature. The United States is such a big country and we’re lucky to still have any nature at all, or maybe it’s less luck and more the hard work of environmentalists, but that’s a story for another day. 

Racism: How loud can a dog whistle be and still be a dog whistle? Kamala Harris had a little more than 107 days to run against me. The missteps, delays, and infighting in the Democratic Party establishment were delightful to watch, but my campaign made it all about misogynoir — that’s a new word for me and one I had to practice saying for this speech. Throughout my career as a real-estate developer, a man about New York, a TV personality, and a politician, I have been a racist. I still am a racist.

I only have a short time to unlearn a lifetime of prejudice and I might not get all the way there. Of course, this is a fantasy speech, but even in such a situation people don’t transform overnight. I have a lot to atone for, but Black women deserve a special apology from me. I am sorry. If I have any money after this election campaign and all my lawsuits, I will gift some of it to Howard University in Kamala Harris’s name and more to support whatever Stacey Abrams is up to right now. 

Women: There’s no excuse, no apology I can make for how I’ve treated you. So, I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to make this suggestion to other men: Don’t follow my lead. Don’t become a Trump. Being a man shouldn’t mean using your strength to hurt or denigrate others. I’m a misogynist and don’t deserve to be president.

This election demonstrated that, as issues, reproductive rights cut deep. I’ve stood on both sides of that chasm (even in the same speech or at least on the same day),  promising the Christian right abortion bans, telling awful lies about late-term abortions, and then backing away from all of that in a word salad of vagueness.

About babies, uteruses, fetuses, and choice, I have nothing to say. I have no authority when it comes to them and should do nothing but listen.

War: I tapped into something fundamental in my speeches on the campaign trail, didn’t I? Besides surfacing the hatred, homophobia, and misogyny that so many Americans have, I also struck an odd note about militarism. As you know, I’m no pacifist, but I did pick up just how dismayed and angry so many Americans are by the money this country spends globally fighting wars, donating weapons, and offering military aid. I then turned that discomfort into a gross nativism to serve my ego, fitting it into my narrative of American exceptionalism — keeping people out, while keeping our money and weaponry in, and leaving the otherwise shut border door slightly ajar for the cheap goods of the world. It hardly matters that none of that will work, since it played so well in Peoria.

I will say, though, that the United States should not be supporting Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, a war that’s killing so many civilians, destroying so much infrastructure, and seeding future grievances and conflicts you’ll be dealing with for generations. Good luck with all that. I’ll be over here working on my golf handicap (and it honestly does need work). 

Beyond the Middle East, the United States clearly needs to rethink its relationship with the rest of the world and, believe you me, I’m not the guy to do that kind of hard work. 

Immigrants: I made a lot of political hay demonizing immigrants in the grossest imaginable way. I couldn’t believe how much my crowds enjoyed it. You people are terrible. Did you know that your lifestyles wouldn’t last 20 minutes without all those illegally employed at low wages doing dangerous, difficult jobs for major corporations? When was the last time you slaughtered and dressed a chicken, changed the sheets on king-sized beds and cleaned rooms in a big hotel, took care of a whole nursing home full of elderly people, or worked in an industrial laundry? Everyone loves going apple-picking in the fall, but have you ever picked apples for a 12-hour shift? Of course, I should talk, given that I employed lots of undocumented workers across my many businesses.

In truth, for all the storm and fury I created over illegal immigrants, our economy needs workers. That same economy creates enduring inequities and spews out enough climate-changing greenhouse gasses to propel people in the Global South off their lands and out of their communities, searching for better prospects here in the U.S. The last time I was in office, I separated kids from their families and made a traumatizing mess that people still haven’t recovered from. I don’t want to do it again!

Trans People’s Rights: If you haven’t watched the ads that my campaign put out about trans people, you’re lucky. They’re unconscionable and show that I’ll stop at nothing to get elected, not even demonizing a small, vulnerable group of Americans. It was like scapegoating Shakers or Zoroastrians! Instead of spending $400 million on ads that vilified trans people, I literally could have given each trans person more than $1,000, because they represent about under 2% of the U.S. population. So, here’s what I’m going to say now from this huge platform you’ve given me: Trans people are people. They deserve freedom, have the right to make a living, stay personally safe, play sports, go to the bathroom, and be left alone. The Republican Party writ large should stop being so transphobic, a word I just learned that feels weird in my mouth.   

Electoral Reform: This was a ridiculously expensive election. I love expensive things, but this was absurd. We worked harder and spoke louder to fewer people on more divisive and fear-pitched issues. Some were literally drowning in text ads, mailbox stuffers, emails, and phone calls. Others barely knew there was an election coming. This has to change. Our electoral system is broken, not because of phantom ballot-box stuffers or other gross lies I told, but because of the Electoral College and the outsized influence of corporate interests. There are smart people out there with reasonable ideas about how to change that. We should listen to them — and I should stop talking! 

The Economy: They say, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and they’re right. I flogged that horse hard on the campaign trail. What does it say about us that cheap gas, cheap eggs, and cheap consumer goods all come at the expense of the damage I’ve promised to do to this world? Imagine for a moment the real expense, environmental and otherwise, of cheap and plentiful gas and groceries, and the havoc my economic policies will wreak internationally.

Being an American is expensive. Being a Hegemon is climate destroying. Living a First World lifestyle exacts a huge toll on the environment. Nationally and individually, we should be paying massive reparations, indemnities, and fines for the damage our domestic and foreign economic policies have caused. That money could buy a heck of a lot of sea walls, windmills, and electric mass transit systems as we make meaningful changes to mitigate the coming climate disaster and build resiliency. Of course, I’m too old to do anything except to get out of the way so that the work that I held at bay for too long can start in earnest.

And One Last Thing, America: I am the Great Disrupter and I almost broke America. There are those who would say it’s been broken for a long time. Those who would say that it was broken from day one. You can debate that to your heart’s content. For me, this all started as a big scam, an ego-boosting game, another hustle. Still, as you can see, I learned a thing or two along the way. Now, I plan to get out of the way and only hope that all of you who voted for me can learn something, too. 

(If only!)

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD.

I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency. Who does? In my case, it’s a tough one for a few reasons, the biggest being that I’m an avowed pacifist who believes that war is a crime against humanity, a failure of the imagination, and never (no, not ever) necessary. Along with the rest of my family of five, I live below the taxable income level. That way, we don’t pay into a system that funds war preparations and war-making. We have to be a little creative to make our money stretch further and we don’t eat out or go to the movies every week. But we don’t ever feel deprived as a result. In essence, I’ve traded career success and workplace achievement for a slightly clearer conscience and time — time to work to end militarism and break our collective addiction!

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that, in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to be $849.8 billion for 2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes for “national defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculated that, since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8 trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!

It would be nice to ignore such monstrous numbers and the even bigger implications they suggest, to unfocus my eyes slightly as I regularly drive by the fenced facilities, manicured office parks, and noisy, bustling shipyards that make up the mega-billion-dollar-a-year industry right in my own neighborhood that’s preparing for… well, yes… the end of the world. Instead, I’m trying to be clear-eyed and aware. I’m checking my personal life all the time for compromise or conciliation with militarism: Am I being brainwashed when I find myself cheering for the fighters in that blockbuster movie we splurged on? Am I doing enough to push for a ceasefire in Gaza? Am I showing up with young people in my community who are backing higher salaries for teachers and no more police in schools? And of course, I keep asking myself: How are my daily consumer decisions lining up with my lofty politics?

I don’t always like the answers that come up in response to such questions, but I keep asking them, keep trying, keep pushing. Those who suffer from Militarism Abuse Disorder can’t even ask the questions, because they’re distracted by the promises of good jobs, nice apartments, and cheap consumer goods that the military-industrial complex is always claiming are right around the corner.

But here in my community, they never deliver!

New London: A Profile of Militarism Abuse Disorder

New London is a town of fewer than 28,000 people. The median income here is a little over $46,000 — $32,000 less than the state average. We are a very old community. Long part of the fishing and hunting grounds of the Eastern Pequots, Nehantics, Mashantucket Pequot, and Mohegan, the city was founded in the 1600s and incorporated in the late 1700s. You see evidence of our age in the shape of our streets, curbed and meandering, long ago carved out of fields by cows and wagons, and in our architecture — aging industrial buildings, warehouses, and ice houses in the neighborhoods where their workers once lived — now derelict and empty or repurposed as auto repair stores or barber shops.

Sometimes I watch, almost mesmerized by the ferocious energy of all those cars careening up Howard Street on their way to work at General Dynamics. Car after car headed for work at the very break of day. Every workday at about 3 p.m., they reverse course, a river of steel and plastic rushing and then idling in traffic, trying to get out of town as fast as possible.

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General Dynamics Electric Boat repairs, services, and manufactures submarines armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons. And it certainly tells you something about our world that the company is in the midst of a major hiring jag, looking to fill thousands of positions in New London, Groton, and coastal Rhode Island to build the Columbia-class submarine, the next generation of nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed subs. Those behemoths of human ingenuity and engineering will cost taxpayers a whopping $132 billion, with each of the 12 new boats clocking in at about $15 billion — and mind you, that’s before anything even goes wrong or the schedule to produce them predictably stretches out and out. The company has already solved one big problem: how to wring maximum profits out of this next generation of planet-obliteration-capable subs. And that’s a problem that isn’t even particularly hard to sort out, because some of those contracts are “cost plus,” meaning the company says what the project costs and then adds a percentage on top of that as profit.

Such a cost-plus business bothers me a lot. I could almost be converted into a hard-nosed militarist if our weapons production industry was a nonprofit set of organizations, run with the kind of shoestring ingenuity that dozens of outfits in New London employ to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and care for the victims of domestic violence.

I break from my traffic-watching fugue on Howard Street to reflect on all that furious effort, all those advanced degrees, all that almost impossible intelligence being poured into making an even better, bigger, faster, sleeker, stealthier weapons-delivery system, capable of carrying and firing conventional and nuclear warheads. Why? We have so many already. And as the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war (in 1945) and has tested, perfected, and helped proliferate the technology of ultimate destruction for the last eight decades, the United States should be leading the charge to denuclearize, disarm, and abolish such weaponry. That, after all, is what’s called for in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

If we are ever going to break our MAD addiction, one place to start is here on Howard Street with people who make their living working on one tiny component of this incredibly complex system. Economic conversion, moving resources and skills and jobs from the military-industrial complex to civilian sectors, is a big project. And it could indeed begin right here on Howard Street.

You Get What You Pay For

Our small town is also home to the Coast Guard Academy and two private colleges. Add the acreage of those three non-taxpaying institutions to the nearly 30 churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship that enjoy tax-free status here; throw in the dozens of nonprofits that do all the good work and you end up with an awfully small tax base. As a result, the municipal budget leans heavily on commercial taxpayers like General Dynamics Electric Boat, the military-industrial behemoth that moved into 24 acres of prime waterfront real estate in 2009 after it was vacated by the tax scofflaw Pfizer.

General Dynamics, like other military manufacturers, essentially only has one customer to please, the United States government. That makes the cost-plus contracting scheme even more egregious, guaranteeing that, no matter what goes wrong, its profits are always assured. Such a bonkers, counter-capitalist scenario passes all the costs on to American taxpayers and allows the privately held corporation to pocket all the profits, while handing out fat dividends to its shareholders. According to Sahm Capitol, “Over the past three years, General Dynamics’ Earnings Per Share grew by 3.7% and over the past three years, the total shareholder return was 62%.”

For 2024, General Dynamics Electric Boat is paying taxes on property valued at $90.8 million — almost twice as much as that of the next highest taxpayer in our town. But it is also a bone of contention. The company, which paid CEO Phebe Novakovic $22.5 million in salary and stock awards in 2023, has no trouble taking the City of New London to court when they feel like their property is being overvalued or overtaxed. They win, too, so their property valuations yo-yo year to year when New London has been ordered to repay taxes to General Dynamics. Whether they pay taxes based on $90.8 million in property or $57 million doesn’t really matter to the company. It’s literal pocket change to the Pentagon’s third largest weapons contractor, a company that boasted $42.3 billion in revenue in 2023. But it matters a lot in a place like New London, where the annual budget process routinely shaves jobs from the schools, public works, and the civil service to make the columns all add up.

According to a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier for the Costs of War Project at Brown University, $1 million of federal spending in the military sector creates 6.9 jobs (5.8 direct jobs and 1.1 in the supply chain). That same $1 million would create 8.4 jobs in the wind energy sector or 9.5 jobs in solar energy. Investing $1 million in energy efficiency retrofits creates 10.6 jobs. Use that $1 million to build streets or highways or tunnels or bridges or to repair schools and it will create “over 40 percent more jobs than the military, with a total multiplier of 9.8 jobs per $1 million spending.”

Wait, what? Are you telling me that, with their lack of transparency, accountability, and their cost-plus contracts, while building weapons systems for the sole purpose of destruction and wasting a lot of money in the process, the military-industrial complex is a lousy job creator? Am I to understand that spending money on just about anything else creates more jobs and more economic activity, while not threatening the world with annihilation?

As I work on a local level in my small town in Connecticut, I see how municipal policy should prioritize small businesses, mom-and-pop stores made of brick and mortar, over multinational corporations or big business. I see the return on investment from a small business in granular and tangible ways: the grocery store owner who starts each day by picking up garbage in his parking lot, the funeral home that sponsors the Little League team, the woman at the art gallery and frame shop who waters the street flowers, or the self-employed local photographer who serves on the board of the cooperative grocery store.

These businesses don’t employ tens of thousands of people, but they also don’t insist on tax abatements that undermine our local budget or fill our crowded streets with commuters hell-bent on getting away from the office and our town as quickly as possible.

You get what you pay for, right? Garrett-Peltier’s Costs of War report goes on to note that “healthcare spending creates more than twice as many jobs for the same level of spending, while education creates up to nearly three times as many jobs as defense spending… The employment multipliers for these domestic programs are 14.3 for healthcare, 19.2 for primary and secondary education, and 11.2 for higher education; the average figure for education is 15.2 jobs per $1 million spending.”

These are numbers I wish my City Council would commit to memory. In fact, we should all know these numbers by heart, because they counter the dominant narrative that military spending is good for the economy and that good-paying jobs depend on militarism.

The United States is investing trillions of dollars in the military, as well as in weapons contractors like General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. Every U.S. president in modern history has prioritized the bottom lines of those corporations over a safe and healthy future for the next generation. Consider all of that as just so many symptoms of Militarism Abuse Syndrome. Isn’t it finally time to get really mad at MAD? Let’s kick the habit and get clean!

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, where I live, has one floor for its permanent collection, with works from the 1600s to perhaps a decade ago, a mixture of famous names and those that are (at least to me) obscure indeed. That collection on the first floor remains the same, year in and year out, while new exhibits circulate through the upstairs galleries every few months. I try to take in each new exhibit and often find myself surprised, inspired, and even educated by what I see.

Recently, I visited an exhibit I’ve been unable to get out of my mind: Beatrice Cuming: Connecticut Precisionist. Ever heard of her? No? Well, neither had I. Cuming was born in 1903 in Brooklyn and studied painting at the Pratt Institute. She continued her studies in France, traveling extensively to Brittany, Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere before ending up in New London of all places. Cuming had returned to New York from her travels in 1933 and then decided to move to Boston. On a train with all her belongings, she looked out the window — so the story goes — as it pulled into New London and impulsively got off, drawn by what she later described as the “obviously beautiful, powerful, dramatic, [and] exciting” subject matter in our town.

And she stayed, painting city scenes and diving into the local arts community. To support herself, she got a job as a security guard at the General Dynamics Electric Boat company. I try to imagine her, maybe wearing a green jumpsuit, a flashlight, and a ring of keys at her waist, patrolling Electric Boat’s massive yard and docks in nearby Groton. During World War II, that company must have been a 24/7 operation as it churned out 74 submarines and 398 PT boats from those very docks. Those subs were responsible for fearsome (and stealthy) destruction of Japanese targets. That war ended, of course, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the 1950s, with the Cold War with the Soviet Union ramping up, Electric Boat would start manufacturing nuclear submarines. 

Submarines As Still Life

Eventually, realizing the prodigious talent of its security guard, the company commissioned Cuming to begin documenting its contributions to the war effort. As Electric Boat’s artist-in-residence (so to speak), she produced a number of breathtaking works. All too literally. I sat across from her painting Welders at Electric Boat Company unable to breathe.

It’s a dark painting with enormous pieces of metal being transformed by heat and fire, the background crowded with partially built submarine components. Its dominant colors are brown and yellow. At the center, a white-hooded welder bends over his work as plumes of white smoke billow upward. There are four other workers in the painting, all indistinguishable, hooded and jump-suited in layers of protective gear. That’s the detail that stays with me, that stuck in my throat — those workers enshrouded in their safety suits.

However those suits may have protected them, count on one thing: what they and their successors built will not protect us. The power they wielded (and welded) to shape and connect part to part in the last days of World War II has held the world hostage ever since.  We, all 8.1 billion of us, are today anything but protected from the nuclear submarines their successors would make. In our flimsy pedestrian garb, we remain so desperately vulnerable. In the background of Cuming’s painting, there are ladders up to a platform and almost out of the painting. Where do the ladders lead? Does Cuming mean to offer an escape from that man-made hell? That might be reading too much into the painting. But what else are you supposed to do in an art museum?

It’s a mesmerizing wartime portrait that draws you in — even though there’s nothing beautiful about it. Another of Cuming’s works from that period, Chubb, is at least set outside, with glimpses of sea and sky through the unfinished hulk of another sub, the USS Chubb, as it towers on that dry dock.

Breathless at Billions and Kilotons

What took my breath away? I kept thinking about all the labor and money invested in constructing submarines — from the relatively crude and uncomfortable boats of the 1940s and 1950s to the brand new Columbia Class nuclear submarine that General Dynamics Electric Boat is building right now. The Navy’s budget for just 12 of those ballistic missile submarines is $126.4 billion. Imagine! If the Navy’s budget for that one weapons system was a country, it would have the third-largest military budget on earth.

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The Columbia will be the biggest and most expensive submarine ever built. How perfectly American, right? Even down to the fact that it’s named in honor of the District of Columbia, the disenfranchised, desperately unequal, and remarkably segregated capital of the United States of America. I’d love to see an artwork that encapsulates that grim irony.

Those new Columbia subs will dwarf what Beatrice Cuming’s welders were working on when she captured them in 1944. Each will be 560 feet long, or a few feet more than the height of the Washington Monument. And its bulk will displace 20,810 tons of water.

But the size and expensiveness aren’t anywhere near as important as the payload of nuclear weapons it will carry with a power those welders of Cuming’s time could hardly have imagined and that Cuming would have been hard-pressed to render with brushes and paint. Each of those 12 new submarines will be equipped with 16 nuclear missile tubes for Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). And those tubes will each be able to house up to 12 independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as W88s, costing about $150 million each and packing a mind-boggling 455-kiloton wallop. 

Okay, now do the math with me. What does 12 times 16 times 12 equal? That’s right: 2,304. Now, multiply that by the thermonuclear force of 455 kilotons, and you get more than one million kilotons. An unthinkable power.

Now, look back into history and recall the utter devastation of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later by “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” two comparatively crude and small atomic bombs by today’s standards. They leveled two cities, caused more than 200,000 deaths (mostly of Japanese civilians), and spread radioactive material responsible for cancer and birth defects for years to come while poisoning landscapes.

And Fat Man was a 21 kiloton weapon; Little Boy, just 15 kilotons.

In short, the firepower of the future Columbia class submarine fleet will be nearly 30,000 times the combined power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What would a canvas depicting that devastation look like? I have no idea. I can’t imagine, and I wonder whether a visual artist would even be able to represent or capture that sort of — if you don’t mind the invention of a term — dis-creation.

Of course, not all of those Columbia-class submarines will be deployed at once and they could be outfitted with fewer than 12 warheads, and some of those warheads could be the “smaller” W76 variety. Those qualifications and caveats aside, the math is the math and it’s catastrophic. Each of those future billion-dollar behemoths could menace the world with the equivalent of 5,824 Hiroshimas.

In the words of the Congressional Research Service, the “basic mission” of such new nuclear-armed subs would be “to remain hidden at sea with their SLBMs, so as to deter a nuclear attack on the United States by another country by demonstrating to other countries that the United States has an assured second-strike capability, meaning a survivable system for carrying out a retaliatory nuclear attack.”

What a mission! How anything but basic! To accept such logic is to invest all those billions of taxpayer dollars in the possibility of destroying even the last gasp of life on Planet Earth.

Exploring New London and Groton, you might happen upon a brightly painted, chubby “submarine” in a park or public square. There are 20 of these mini-subs around our community, almost a decade after the region celebrated Connecticut’s Submarine Century. When they were smaller, my kids loved to climb on the one down by the train station, riding it like a carousel horse. There’s another inside my daughter’s school. The creativity and collaboration are delightful, but the reduction of submarines to kitschy local icons is downright insidious. Those shiny fiberglass mini-subs have no connection to the sleek, metallic nuclear-armed leviathans that carry about 70% of this country’s nuclear arsenal. You can’t enjoy those public art objects and think about the Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, which asserted the right of the United States to use nuclear weapons unilaterally and offensively. The cognitive dissonance is just too loud.

Imagining The New

Beatrice Cuming painted her Electric Boat canvases nearly 80 years ago. As I sat in the quiet of the Lyman Allyn museum staring at her welder painting, the Israeli Defense Forces were undoubtedly dropping American-manufactured bombs on Gaza, killing civilians, including women and children. The chief financial officer of General Dynamics, Cuming’s old employer and muse, responded to that new wave of warfare (and high stock prices) with a prediction that “the Israel situation is only going to put upward pressure on [the] demand” for the company’s artillery. Nearer to home, New London’s city council is raising taxes on residents to close gaps in the school budget, among other things. Meanwhile, General Dynamics recently petitioned to have its New London property values reassessed and won, giving the country’s fifth-largest weapons manufacturer tens of thousands of dollars in tax relief (money our community could really use).

Sitting in the Lyman Allyn gallery pondering all of this, I concluded that the military-industrial complex should more often be a subject for painters. What, I wondered, would Cuming capture today? The work has changed so much. Would she paint a test engineer stuck in her car as peace activists blockaded the main entrance to the General Dynamics complex? A configuration management analyst hunched over a computer terminal, his mind numbed by data, while he worried about his mortgage?

The story of Beatrice Cuming arriving in New London, working for Electric Boat, being hired to paint their products… it all now sounds to me like the potential set-up for a spy movie. And when you add in that Cuming had traveled the world, spoke French and Arabic, had relationships with women, and was investigated by the FBI for supposedly spying on Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, hers would certainly be an alluring tale today: a lesbian artist working undercover as a security guard, waiting for her moment, plotting to gain access to the sensitive heart of the matter?

No such luck, of course! Beatrice Cuming doesn’t appear to have been motivated in any way by anti-militarism or an anti-modernist critique. In fact, in a 1946 interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, she remarked, “There is beauty in the growth of America. We are busy going forward. We can’t go back.” 

The inevitability of progress, at all costs, is deeply ingrained in American thinking. Unfortunately, it’s exactly the wrong answer. We can, in fact, go back. We have to. Of course, we can’t uninvent the atomic bomb, but we can begin to control nuclear weapons. We can begin arms-controlling the heck out of them on the way to disarmament, opening up the possibility of nuclear abolition. And in all of this, artists could indeed lead the way. The power of creativity and imagination is — if you don’t mind my inventing an apt word for this moment — kilotonic. At least in our imagination, we can recall all our weapons of mass destruction from around the world: creating the biggest weapons buyback program in history. After all, there simply is no way forward through the military-industrial complex and no possibility of peace lurking there.

Last week, I ran across the Gold Star Memorial Bridge, a mile-long span over the Thames River — no, not in London, but right in my neighborhood of New London, Connecticut — on the narrow, cramped bike lane with views up the river. When I was almost at the top of the bridge, nearly 155 feet above the water, I saw a submarine headed up the river, escorted by tugboats and moving smoothly. There, high above the water, I was struck by how a vessel so massive and fearsome could look so small and toylike down below.

I was grateful then for the implacability of that river, the height I was above it, and the huge expanse of sky above me. For a moment, I could breathe. For a moment, I wasn’t afraid.

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

We’ve owned this house for nearly 12 years, since just weeks before our son was born. In all that time, I’ve regularly gone down there to do the laundry and store my things (which never seem to stop accumulating). And somehow, it went from being empty when we bought it to chock-a-block full today in a way that would make Marie Kondo’s perfect hair stand straight up. 

One day recently, I noticed two booklets attached by a screw with an outdated head to one of the beams under the basement stairs. That roused my curiosity since I had no memory of putting them there and, without laundry to distract me, I tried to free them, using a dozen different screwdrivers, none of which had that old-fashioned head, so eventually I pulled them loose with the claw end of a hammer.

Keep Calm and Head West

The top one was entitled “Emergency Planning at Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Plants: A Guidebook for Our Neighbors” and was addressed to “Resident.” Nowhere in that 23-page booklet was there a date, but it referred to our power company as Connecticut Light and Power and mentioned Connecticut Yankee, a local nuclear power plant that closed nearly 30 years ago.

We still get a similar booklet every couple of years, because we live seven miles from the area’s remaining nuclear power plant, all too aptly named Millstone and situated on a picturesque peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound. I sat in my kitchen, holding that ancient booklet and listening to the hum of the refrigerator (powered by — yes! — nuclear energy). The current PR line on nuclear power is that it’s a cheap and reliable bridge to renewable energy and a crucial partner in generating a carbon-free future. Here in Connecticut, half of all our power comes from Millstone, which is managed by Dominion Energy.

On its peninsula between Pleasure Beach and Hole in the Wall Beach, Millstone draws 2.2 billion gallons of water from Long Island Sound daily to use in its cooling towers. That water, according to a report from the Yale School of Management, is then returned to the Sound 32 degrees warmer than when it was pulled out. Scientists are now studying warm water plumes from Millstone, Indian Point, and other East Coast nuclear power plants to try to understand their impact on oxygen and nutrient levels in those waters. The Yale report notes that “populations of several commercially important species, including lobster and winter flounder, have steeply declined in Long Island Sound over the past two decades, but scientists are unsure whether overfishing, habitat degradation, disease, or warm water discharge from Millstone is to blame.”

Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, just about 80 miles due north of Baltimore, my childhood home, suffered a meltdown three days before my fifth birthday. So, I have a visceral fear of cooling towers and nuclear radiation. The booklet I found didn’t exactly allay my anxieties. It suggested that, in the event of a crisis at the plant, we should evacuate along a series of two-lane roads that have only gotten more congested in the decades since that booklet was published. “If possible, use only one car. If you have room, please check to see if any of your neighbors need a ride. Keep your car windows and air vents closed.” It suggested packing for a three-day trip and included a helpful list of things not to forget like pillows and toiletries. The booklet advised calm again and again, offering these (cold) comforting words, “Contrary to some popular misconceptions, a nuclear plant emergency would not be a sudden event. A severe nuclear accident would take considerable time to develop, enabling state and local officials to take the necessary protective actions in a timely fashion.” Tell that to the people of Chernobyl and Fukushima. How much time is time enough?

Build a Bunker, Survive the Fallout (But Not the Blast)

The second booklet was emblazoned with the all-caps title “FALLOUT PROTECTION FOR HOMES WITH BASEMENT” and was sent to our address in May 1967 by the Department of Defense’s Office of Civil Defense with the descriptor “Family Residing At.” As I leafed through the 60-year-old pages, I realized that the long-time homeowner had screwed it to the underside of the basement stairs in response to a suggestion on the back of the booklet: “For quick reference, hang this booklet in the corner of your basement having the best fallout protection.”

The booklet was personalized for our very basement based on a questionnaire the homeowner must have filled out once upon a time, because we were instructed to follow plans C through F to increase our “Protection Factor,” or PF, from radiation by 40%. Any “Home Handy Man,” we were assured, could construct a permanent shelter in the basement or at least pre-plan one to be quickly constructed after a nuclear attack. The booklet also had recommendations for how to improvise a shelter once you were cowering in that post-nuclear basement of yours. It did warn, however, that even if you had indeed constructed one, a “fallout shelter provides only limited protection against blast.”

There was, as it happened, no third booklet offering instruction to the home handyman on just how to protect his family from a future neighborhood nuclear blast and, of course, all these years later, there’s no fallout shelter in our basement and no stack of materials to make one with. Still, as someone whose parents were well-known anti-nuclear activists and who’s always feared the possibility of a future nuclear war, I found myself riveted to the spot in the basement of my 1905 home, imagining my family of five seeking shelter here during some kind of nuclear catastrophe. The walls are stones cobbled together with mortar and painted. That painted mortar regularly flakes onto the cement floor, coating it in a sort of crumbly dry snow. We occasionally squirt expanding foam into the holes in the foundation, but there’s still one corner where my kids like to hold their hands and exclaim: “I can feel the breeze” and “it smells like mud right here.” According to our Fallout Protection booklet, that corner is the “strongest” one, so before a nuclear attack, I do hope that I’ll get around to closing up all those holes.

In truth, it would be a mighty grim existence in that basement of ours. Especially if I don’t fix the corner where the kids feel the breeze. There are lots of bikes, a massive canoe and life preservers, plenty of canning supplies, a dehydrator, heat lamps and other accessories for raising chickens, and my husband’s beer-making and distilling supplies. Most of these cool homesteadish things are useless without electricity, heat, or potable water. 

The booklet offers no advice on how to supply a fallout shelter with water or beer or anything else, nor does it tell us how long we’d need to be down there. It does say: “Until the extent of the radiation threat in your town is determined by trained monitors using special instruments, you should stay in your shelter as much as possible. For essential needs, you can leave your shelter for a few minutes.” It suggests we get a battery-powered radio.

Of course, the information in that booklet is now 57 years old, long before the world of modern media arrived. I could go online and stream untold numbers of DIY tutorials on bunker-building and provisioning. By now, prepping for disasters, whether nuclear, conventional, or farcical is a multibillion-dollar business. You can even attend a weekend course on wilderness survival techniques for $800. However, nothing I read about that class offered guidance on surviving “a war, societal collapse, or some other calamity” with three kids, so I’m probably staying put. A battery-operated radio might not be a bad idea, though.

You Can’t Hide from Nukes

I mostly head down to the basement in a “keep the laundry-train running” fog. Nuclear war is a constant hum in the back of my mind. It’s a fear that won’t go away and that sets me apart from most Americans. It seems as if most of us deal with nuclear issues by — should the thought even occur to us — trying to push them away as quickly as possible. In an annual survey, Chapman University has been tracking American fears for nearly a decade now. Government corruption and economic collapse top the list, which also includes loved ones getting sick and dying. Fears of war are similarly prevalent, but the specific fear that stalks my dreams isn’t there — the possibility that the nightmare that rained down on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 of them, when the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons, could happen again.

I know I’m an odd duck with my nuclear preoccupation. Of course, I live in the self-declared “Submarine Capital of the World.” New London/Groton has been building nuclear submarines since the 1950s and the U.S. naval base here is home port to 15 nuclear attack submarines. So that’s one reason nukes are on my mind.

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Then there are those two terrible wars raging right now between nuclear-armed invaders (Russia and Israel) and non-nuclear entities (Ukraine and Hamas).  Those nuclear-tinged wars worry me. And am I the only person who noticed that, just recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight? I also read enough to know that our government is going to spend more than $55 billion on nuclear weapons research, development, and testing in 2024 alone. And that figure doesn’t even include the whopping sums being invested in new nuclear delivery systems like Columbia class submarines or the upgrading of the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. I can get stuck there sometimes, especially when schools, clinics, and homeless shelters around me are struggling to keep their doors open.

Watching the (Nuclear) Clock at Family Gatherings

Such facts swirl in my head all the time — sometimes emitting a low hum, sometimes growing uncomfortably shrill. But I work hard to have other interests and worries. My anti-nuclear activist mother was constitutionally unable not to talk about nuclear weapons and that’s a cautionary tale for me. I can still remember how we wouldn’t go to family weddings or reunions or anything else scheduled in the first 10 days of August, because we were memorializing the bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Since my mother was one of seven siblings in a big Irish Catholic family and had dozens of nieces and nephews, we missed a lot of family summer gatherings thanks to that principle.

Perhaps it was for the best, though, since I do remember one truly awkward exchange between my mother and a relative:

“Oh hi, Liz, good to see you. You look lovely. How have you been?”

And my mom replied: “Well, I’ve been better. We’re three minutes to nuclear midnight, you know. It keeps us very busy.” (In those days, the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock was slightly farther from “midnight.”)

An uncomfortable silence followed, spreading like nuclear winter and eventually the relative excused herself to get another martini.

I try not to do that myself to unsuspecting friends and relatives, but I’d be lying if I told you that sometimes I didn’t think like my mom.

Unlike me, most people have, I suspect, stuck the whole history, science, and politics of that world-killing technology in the proverbial basement (though not ours, of course). So, imagine my surprise when I found all that strange history stuck in my own basement!

The Only Protection is Prohibition

Now that I think about it, the best protection to be found in that basement of mine is our stash of anti-nuclear protest signs. In one corner are all the ones the Connecticut Committee to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons uses in its protests. There are “disarm now” signs, a sturdy yellow banner with quotes from the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and a stack of 70 “Thank You” posters for each of the nations that are party to that Treaty. My kids, some of our friends, and I made those signs to express our gratitude to countries like Benin, Honduras, and Thailand that have agreed (unlike the nine countries with such weaponry) not to develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, or possess, no less stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or accept nuclear weapons from other countries, or allow them to be stored on their territory.

Mark Twain supposedly said that war is how Americans learn geography. In making those signs and waving them near the local General Dynamics complex contracted to design the next generation of nuclear-capable submarines, my kids and I are learning a different kind of geography. As we resist, we celebrate the geography of the true superpowers on this planet, the nations that are trying to lead the way to a nuclear-free, bunker-free future where children won’t have to even imagine hiding in their basements.

In the meantime, I’m going to hang these two booklets back up under the basement stairs as relics of what I’d love to think of as a bygone era. I just have to find the right screwdriver.

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

Too dry.

Too many weapons.

This world needs changing.

But that’s too vague. After all, this world is already changing, just not in ways that are good for you and me.

You know the facts. July 2023 was the hottest month on record — ever — since we humans started keeping track of the temperature. And it’s only getting hotter. As Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, told the New York Times, the recent all-too-extreme weather is just “a foretaste of the future.”

Declaring War on Ourselves

It’s not raining. Not at least where (and when) so many of us need it for drinking water or agriculture or recreation. Uruguay is out of water, with the government prioritizing data centers and multinational corporations instead of its thirsty people. In South Africa, the government is proposing purifying water from abandoned mines as a solution to a protracted water crisis and lack of drinking water. People in cities like Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, know what that feels like. It’s not just thanks to natural shortages, but mismanagement, corporate misdeeds, lack of investment in critical infrastructure, and racism, all mixed with climate change. And that’s only the beginning. Dozens of metropolises are in danger of ending up with contaminated or scarce drinking water (or both). Worse yet, when it does rain, it’s killing and destroying like the flash floods in Vermont a month or so ago or in China’s partly devastated capital, Beijing, and environs just recently.

And if nature taking aim at us weren’t enough, it seems that we’ve declared war on ourselves. Not just in places like Ukraine or Sudan, where the death tolls are in the thousands, but closer to home, too, where Americans are madly over-armed with nearly 400 million guns. I’m thinking about our cities and towns, highways and byways, schools and synagogues. After all, according to the Gun Violence Archive, such weaponry has killed more than 24,000 people so far this year alone (and that’s already more than the number of civilians killed in Ukraine and Sudan combined).

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It’s as if we are at war, but the enemy is us.

It’s enough to make you hide under the covers, turn up your air conditioning (if you have it), and give up. But that, it turns out, just makes things worse. After all, cranking up the AC is part of what left us teetering at the edge of irreversible climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, research into loneliness suggests that isolation only creates more suspicion and further retards our ability to connect.

Still, is it all so bad, so completely awful that it’s not even worth trying anymore?

Here are the statistics that stay with me from a new study, as reported by the Guardian. “The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things… Yet since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.” This staggering observation demonstrates the devastating impact human life has had on all life, which leads me to ask: With some large-scale tweaking and significant reorientation, could we humans have a similarly big impact in a positive way? Or at least a similarly big impact in not such a terribly negative one?

Reinventing Myself

Given the giant impression — think major meteor-sized explosion — we humans have made on Planet Earth, could we try something else?

Could we adapt? Change? Continue to evolve? Live differently?

As for myself, microscopic as I am in the giant scheme of things, I’ve made a few small changes in the last year that might have been helpful. As a start, I stopped eating gluten, cut out refined sugar, cut down on alcohol, and limited myself to one cup of coffee a day. Now, I only occasionally eat meat. These were just personal decisions, taken with my aging body and changing metabolism in mind, rather than ones meant for the health of the planet.

Still, small changes of this sort made me think differently, too. I stopped imagining the ideal breakfast as sausage, toast, and eggs, and started thinking about it as collard greens, brown rice, and eggs. There was both surprise and pride there, too, when I found that I could do it, that it wasn’t even very hard. It just took a little thought.

I went from drinking coffee as soon as I woke up until the pot was gone late in the day to making just a single cup. Period. And no, such small changes won’t mitigate climate change or much of anything else. Still, if you told me a year ago that I would be a gluten-free, one-cup-of-coffee kind of person, I would have laughed in your face.  

Our planet needs this kind of small-scale change, but it needs so much more than that.

During the 1960s, Spain flooded an eleventh-century town to harness hydroelectric power.. When the reservoir was full, you could still see the top of the ancient church tower sticking out of the water. That reservoir provided local drinking water, power, and a place for fishing and tourism. Today, however, in a distinctly overheated, drought-ridden, climate-change-battered Spain, that reservoir is almost empty and the remains of the town are completely dry. As the owner of a small kayaking business there told Bloomberg News, “Everything is very uncertain.” He used to take tourists out on the reservoir to paddle around the submerged ruins. “If the drought keeps on going,” he said, “we’ll have to reinvent ourselves somehow.”

And he’s not alone on this sweltering planet of ours. Sooner or later, we’re all going to have to reinvent ourselves — or else! We can’t keep being the human beings who live to destroy.

Bikes and Pedestrians Are Traffic, Too

Yesterday, I set off to live my day without a car. I rode my bike to an appointment a mile away from my house in New London, Connecticut. It was hot — low 90s and high humidity — but on my bike there was a breeze. Sweet shady swaths of wind! Then I rode another mile to the post office and back to board a shuttle across the Gold Star Bridge.

That shuttle is an adaptation, too. At the end of April, an accident involving a home-oil delivery truck killed the driver and engulfed the bridge in flames. Traffic was shut down for hours. The bridge reopened later that day to car traffic (120,000 of the gas-guzzlers every 24 hours), but three months later, the bike path for cyclists and pedestrians is still out of commission (no guzzling for us). Instead, I have to board a little bus that can carry two or three bicycles and a dozen pedestrians that gets us safely across the bridge. It’s free and on time and an acknowledgment that cyclists and pedestrians are “traffic,” too, but it burns gas and takes about three times as long as my usual pedal. My mother is in a nursing home on the other side of that bridge and seeing her is a big part of my days.

I used to bike to her. Now, I have to bike-shuttle-bike. No need for the gym. In this broiling summer, I come home completely drenched in sweat.

Still, that shuttle aside, greater car-lessness (or fossil-fuel-burning-lessness) is doable, but it requires a mental change. It means accepting that it’s okay to be sweaty, to need a second shirt, to build in extra time to get from point A to point B (which, in fact, you really have to do with a car, too, given how bad traffic can be). I know everyone can’t ride a bike everywhere, but even doing a little of it reminds me that cars are a relatively recent invention and that we should be able to figure out new — or very old — ways of doing things.

Walking. Walking is good for us in every single way and most of us simply don’t do enough of it.

What else can I change? What else can I do? That urgent question asserts itself constantly, even though I know that I’m not exactly the world’s biggest polluter. The United States military has that scandalous distinction. As Neta Crawford points out in her 2022 book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions, the military has been responsible for as much as 80% of federal energy consumption since 2001 — the year the Bush administration launched the Global War on Terror. So, really, one striking way to improve the planet is to work for nuclear disarmament, lower military spending, and a smaller U.S. military footprint throughout the world.  

But while we are working on that, I can also be much more deliberate about driving (until we can afford to get an electric vehicle), especially since my family lives in a small town. The kids and I now walk the mile to their camp every day and my 9-year-old and 11-year-old are clearly up for walking on their own. Our commitment to walking only messed with us once, when the camp staff sent out the wrong morning meeting place and we arrived on foot three miles from where we were supposed to be. A nice mom offered to drive us the rest of the way.

Earlier this summer on vacation, I walked Scotland’s West Highland Way with my husband, my sister, my brother, and their spouses. The six of us trekked more than 90 miles along that ancient Scottish trail. We climbed mountains, followed the edges of lochs, crossed sheep fields, and cut through moors, including Rannoch, the largest wild area in Great Britain — more than 50 square miles of heather and bog.

Yes, we arrived from the U.S. by plane, but being outside all day on foot put me in a contemplative state of mind about our world. I was brought to tears by the beauty, the sheer scale and breadth of green that we encountered — until we turned a corner and were confronted with muddy destruction. The trees were gone, all of them, replaced by tiny saplings growing out of tire treads. This, it turned out, wasn’t just a forest. It was managed — trees produced to be cut down and milled by the massive Scottish timber industry.

In truth, the real world — the one that’s made our planet such a mess — was never far from us as we played at being hobbits, minstrels, or nomads. We walked through what seemed like unfamiliar landscapes, but each footfall followed so many others. I was never alone, even when I slowed down and gathered wool from the fences and weeds, tucking clumps of it into the side pocket of my backpack. I was, in fact, walking in the history of this unfamiliar land. Part of our route was along Wade’s Road, built by hundreds of soldiers over more than a decade to help the British put down the Jacobite Rebellions in the 1700s. They fought then over who chose their kings: God or humans! Wars back then were so silly, weren’t they? (Unlike those today, ha ha!)

There were drainage pipes and stairways and bridges, all evidence of the investment the Scottish government and park stewards had put into the West Highland Way as a generator of tourist dollars. And then there were the people. When we stopped for lunch or paused to take off our raincoats for the eighth or ninth time, groups of trekkers from Belgium, Holland, France, and so many other places passed by with quiet greetings.

The West Highland Way turns out to be a giant cash generator for the Scottish government. Those streams of people who come to walk there and stay in the bed-and-breakfast inns, drink in the pubs, and buy the band-aids (they call them “plasters”) and potato chips (“crisp packets”) inject 5.5 million pounds sterling into local economies along the way.

And in the end, all of it, sadly enough — walking or not — helps feed the burning of this planet.

One Foot in Front of the Other

So how do we keep going when the future is so uncertain and full of dread? One advantage of just walking is you just walk. You don’t think about the future at all, just the next footfall. In our normal lives, we spend so much time trying to escape the elements — rain delays, events postponed, heat an ever-increasing factor in our summer planning — but in Scotland, we just kept walking.

Now that I’m home, I’ve done the same. I find walking in my community a great antidote to despair about the world. We don’t have AC, so these days, it’s often cooler (or at least breezier) outside our house than in it.

Who walks in this heat? Poor people, people with dogs, and health enthusiasts. I don’t feel hopeless when I’m walking. I feel connected, attentive, and activated. I’m too busy noticing the world, feeling my body, and keeping a lookout for cars (and bikes!).

Admittedly, on a planet already heating to startling extremes, it’s not much and we desperately need the groups now organizing against climate change (just as we need governments and fossil-fuel companies to revolutionize their priorities and operations, as well as a dismantling of the military-industrial complex). But it’s not nothing either.

I know that walking in an oven world doesn’t end wars, but it doesn’t use the oil that so many of our wars are fought over. The climate won’t cool just because I’m walking more. The world-to-come for my children won’t broil less because of the tiny things I’m doing in my life. But it won’t get worse while I’m walking either. And in the quiet contemplation of walking, maybe a new idea will spring forth.

We can at least hope, as the work and the walking continue. It’s a scary world to walk through when you realize that the enemy is us.

Copyright 2023 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

When it comes to TikTok content providers, I wouldn’t normally think of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It’s a deeply serious organization founded in 1945 by physicists in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was invented two years later by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf as a way of graphically illustrating the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. In its 76 years of existence, its hands have been moved 25 times, but never more ominously than in January of this year!

And no need to look further than TikTok to see what happened. Amid all the tweens trying to jumpstart the next viral craze, a 30-second video features five representatives of the Bulletin‘s science and security board frozen in place as a voice intones: “We move the clock forward, the closest it has ever been to midnight.” Then two of them pull a cloth off it and add, “It is now 90 seconds to midnight.”

On TikTok, versions of this video got hundreds of thousands of “likes” and thousands of comments. Mind you, that’s a blip compared to the videos of even minor celebrities. Still, I found myself scrolling through the comments, many of them versions of “Does this mean I don’t have to pay my mortgage/bills/ taxes?” Others had lines like “Someone call the Avengers” or asked if it had anything to do with Taylor Swift’s Midnights album. This being the Internet, there was all too much cursing and all too many oblique emojis, as well as people poking fun at the awkward staging and long stretch of silence in the video.

Mixed with such inanity were expressions of genuine fear, confusion, and distress over the possible immanence of nuclear war. That is, of course, what the clock, as a salient piece of public art, is supposed to do: generate conversation, spark inquiry, and lead to action. As artist Sam Heydt observes, the Doomsday Clock should remind us that “the edge is closer than we think. In a time marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic, and climate change, the future isn’t what it used to be.”

Tick, Tock Indeed!

One hallmark of TikTok is reaction videos where creators split the screen to show their response. In one, a young white woman reacts this way: “Are we supposed to be scared? My generation is never going to have retirement, never going to own a home. I’m living in a van.” I get it: there’s so much that seems more immediate in our world: school shootings, police violence, bank collapses, and inflation, to name just a few. Who even has time to notice now that the future isn’t what it used to be?

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But embedded somewhere in any of those in-your-face issues, whether we know it or not, are nuclear weapons, threatening the end to it all. Certainly, the Pentagon knows it, since (whether you’ve noticed or not), it continues to invest your tax dollars in nuclear weapons, big time. Between 2019 and 2028, the United States is on track to spend at least $494 billion on its nuclear forces, or about $50 billion a year, according to a Congressional Budget Office assessment. Analysts actually estimate that Pentagon plans to “modernize” — yes, that’s the term — its nuclear arsenal could cost you as much as $1.5 to $2 trillion in the coming decades.

The clock has never been so close to midnight and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is using every tool at its disposal to keep clanging the alarm bell. It even has a Doomsday Clock playlist on Spotify, while its 90-second clock announcement was briefly front-page news at the Washington Post (the front of their Science section, anyway) and the New York Times. Still, we live in such an atomized (excuse me for that!) and polarized media environment that it’s increasingly hard to penetrate the noise cloud.

Nuclear weapons, once a top-of-the-line issue for so many Americans, have faded into, at best, a background hum. So, I wonder, what happens after the Doomsday Clock reaches midnight? What’s next for that metaphor? Or as the seconds are shaved away amid a war in Ukraine that could always go nuclear, is it time for an entirely new metaphor, something (excuse me again!) more explosive?

Then, of course, there’s that other great danger to us all, climate change, which, it seems, doesn’t even need a metaphor. The alarm of raging wildfires, unbelievable floods, megadroughts, fiercer storms, fast-melting glaciers, and disappearing rivers leaves the very idea of metaphors in the dust. Climate scientists are blunt to the point of bruising on this. What part of “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” don’t you understand? That, of course, is what the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted with “high confidence.” Tick, tock, indeed!

Come to think of it, maybe nuclear weapons don’t need a new metaphor either. After all, we already have the mushroom cloud, the haunted eyes of that child in Hiroshima, the shadow of a dead person left on that rock, and the unnatural silence that followed the wall of sound and flame incinerating thousands of human beings in an instant. That’s no exaggeration. That was Hiroshima in 1945.

In 2023, when we consume news and images in almost real-time, it’s hard to imagine that the now-iconic images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were censored and treated as contraband by our government at the time. It wasn’t until 1952 that the searing images of photographer Yoshito Matsushige were finally published, first in the Japanese magazine Asahi Gurafu and then in Life magazine. And there’s so much that none of us will ever see. After all, Matsushige spent 10 hours walking through his devastated city of Hiroshima but took only seven pictures. “It was such a cruel site,” he said later, “that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.”

It’s Three Minutes to Midnight and You Want to Do What?

I recently met a group of college students from all over the country. To my shock, none of them seemed to have heard of nuclear weapons before I mentioned them. I couldn’t relate. I’m no Martyl Langsdorf, but thanks to my family, I’ve grown up with the Doomsday Clock in a way few other people have. I don’t remember a day of my life that I haven’t thought about nukes and this country’s ability to literally obliterate humanity.

Some dads say things like “money doesn’t grow on trees” when their kids ask for permission to see a film. My dad was Phil Berrigan, a nuclear abolitionist and peace activist. So, he would say: “It’s three minutes to nuclear midnight and you want to go to the movies?” Imagine living as if your personal choices made a difference when it came to nuclear war. That’s certainly how my parents and their friends in the Catholic Left lived and how a small subculture continues to live today.

My mom and dad, Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, a former nun and a priest, refused to pay “war taxes,” trespassed onto military installations to protest our world-ending ways, held vigils at weapons manufacturing plants, and protested during the stockholder meetings of giant weapons-making corporations, while taking care of the victims of skewed U.S. policies by organizing soup lines and opening their doors to the unhoused.

By reminding me of where the hands on the Doomsday Clock stood at any moment, my dad helped me integrate concerns about nuclear weapons into my daily life. He helped me measure out the energy I had for any worry. I mean, why fork over $8 (now $28?) at a movie box office to get scared by a horror story on the celluloid screen when the real world is scary enough for free?

76 Years of the Doomsday Clock in 25 Moves

So, nuclear timekeeping started in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight.

By 1949, as the Cold War heated up and the Soviet Union got the bomb, the hands on that clock were moved to three minutes to midnight, code for distinctly too close! As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote after Russia exploded its first nuclear device, “We think that Americans have reason to be deeply alarmed and prepare for grave decisions.” The nuclear arms race was off and running. 

In 1953, after the U.S. and the Soviets developed and tested massive hydrogen bombs, those hands were moved to two minutes.

In 1960, sustained international cooperation and the successful negotiation of arms control treaties between the superpower rivals compelled the scientists to move the clock hands back to seven minutes to midnight.

In 1963, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and the terror of near-nuclear war, the U.S. and USSR signed new agreements, ending atmospheric nuclear tests. The world sighed with relief as the clock was moved back to 12 minutes.

But in 1968, as the Vietnam War fanned global tensions, the Soviets expanded their nuclear arsenal, and France and China both developed nuclear weapons, it was at seven minutes again.

1969 brought another sigh of relief as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and the nations with such weaponry committed to future nuclear disarmament talks. The clock inched back to 10 minutes.

In 1972, when the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the disarmament agreement that came to be known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, the clock made it to 12 minutes.

My Life and the Doomsday Clock

In 1974, however, India tested a nuclear device painfully code-named “Smiling Buddha” and that minute hand was moved to nine again. I was born just a few weeks before that Indian test, which spurred neighbor and rival Pakistan to launch its own nuclear program. By the following summer, my parents would carry my infant brother and me as they marched with friends, hauling full-sized replicas of the nuclear weapons that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the streets of Washington, every day for almost a week to mark the 30th anniversary of the atomic bombings.

In 1981, as the Soviets continued their war in Afghanistan and Americans elected Ronald Reagan as president, the clock ominously moved to four minutes. I was seven and my brother six when our father was sentenced to 10 years in jail (later reduced) for his part in a 1980 action. A group that called itself the Plowshares Eight had walked into the General Electric Space Technology Center in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, with the early morning rush of workers. There, they symbolically disarmed some model nuclear weapons. Their trial was later made into a movie starring Martin Sheen (with my dad playing himself).

In 1984, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight as President Reagan pumped money into Star Wars technology as a way to win a future nuclear war. Just a month after I turned 10, my mom went on trial for her Plowshares action a year earlier at Griffiss Air Force base in upstate New York. That summer, my family and their friends also tried to maintain a round-the-clock presence at the Pentagon concourse. 

In 1988, the Bulletin‘s scientists reset the Doomsday Clock at six minutes to midnight as the work of a growing global antinuclear movement started to deliver dividends in agreements to cut back the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons. That summer, when I was 14, we built a rough, shed-like house and brought it to the Pentagon Parade Ground to call for “homes, not bombs.” We stayed all night and watched the rats take over the Pentagon grounds as it grew dark.

By 1990, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clock was readjusted to 10 minutes to midnight, the furthest from disaster since 1968.

In 1991, in the wake of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and began to cut back their nuclear arsenals as the Soviet Union faded into history. Appropriately enough, the Bulletin moved the clock to a breathtaking 17 minutes to midnight, writing: “the illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away.”

In 1995, a close call and human error led the scientists to nudge the clock to 14 minutes and, in 1998, nine minutes, while calling on the United States, Russia, and other nuclear states to “fully commit” to “control the spread of nuclear weapons.”

In 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks and growing concerns about loose nuclear materials, the science and security board adjusted the clock to seven minutes. My father died that December, after a lifetime of anti-war activism. He spent the last year of his life trying to jumpstart a “national strike” for nuclear disarmament.  

In 2007, after North Korea tested its first nuclear device, the Bulletin moved the clock ominously to five minutes to midnight and the science and security board added human-made climate change to the doomsday formula. In that announcement, they wrote, “As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and at the onset of an era of unprecedented climate change, our way of thinking about the uses and control of technologies must change… The clock is ticking.”

In 2010, the Bulletin inched the minute hand back up to six, thanks to the Copenhagen accord on climate change and new negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on arms reductions.

Between six minutes and five minutes to nuclear midnight, I got married, pledging to work for the abolition of such weaponry with my husband, who grew up in southeastern Connecticut, protesting at submarine christenings and launches at a U.S. naval base on the Thames River.  

Thanks to new North Korea aggressiveness and general global intransigence on climate-change commitments, 2012 saw a modest drop to five minutes. That was a “time” that took on a new kind of urgency for me after the Sandy Hook school shootings that killed six teachers and 20 kids about the same age as my dear stepdaughter in nearby Newtown, Connecticut. Her school beefed up security in response, checking IDs and barring parents from the building. Every day, when I carried my newborn son to pick up his sister, I had to go through an elaborate process at dismissal time in a state of near panic, flinching at any loud noise and feeling both the fragility of my kindergartener’s life and the threat to all life from nuclear weapons. After all, the Sandy Hook killer had but a small arsenal compared to what the United States threatened the world with every day.   

By 2015, Russia and the U.S. had both announced new spending to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and, in climate terms, it was the hottest year on record. The Bulletin ominously moved the hands of the clock to three minutes to midnight for the first time since the Cold War year of 1984.

By then, I was the mother of two toddlers, born in 2012 and 2014, and my stepdaughter was 9. Those three wonders helped me stay focused on the beauty of each day and the extraordinary web of life that the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet eternally hold hostage. I recommitted myself then to taking the nuclear threat seriously, but without hectoring my kids about the Doomsday Clock the way my dad had done with me.

In 2017, the Bulletin moved those clock hands 30 seconds closer to midnight, its first half-minute move ever in response to President Donald Trump’s inflammatory nuclear rhetoric, soaring Pentagon budgets, and new threats to the global climate.

A year later, in 2018, we lost another 30 seconds and the clock hit two minutes to midnight, as the Bulletin pointed out that international diplomacy had been “reduced to name-calling, U.S.-Russia relations featured more conflict than cooperation, the Iran deal was imperiled, and greenhouse gas emissions rose anew.”

Though no longer a kid, I still found myself watching a parent being hauled off to jail. This time, it was my mother, then 79, arrested for trespassing with six friends at the Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia in a move to symbolically disarm the Trident nuclear submarines there.

In 2020, the Bulletin’s clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight, while citing the two existential dangers of climate change and nuclear weapons in its press statement.

Over the next two years, the magazine did something new. It didn’t change the hands on the clock but issued press releases about why they remained at 100 seconds. Meanwhile, in 2021, the kids and I helped make 68 signs thanking each of the nations that had adopted the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. My kids poured their hearts into those works of art, adorning them with silver paint and sparkles. That treaty celebration day in New London where we live was cold and windy and the two little ones were almost hidden behind their signs, while they asked me lots of questions about Honduras and the island of Nauru which I gamely tried to answer without resorting to Wikipedia. An adage attributed to Mark Twain came to my mind then: “War is how Americans learn geography.” I smiled, thinking that my kids were learning geography through protest and peacemaking.

And then, this January, the Bulletin‘s science and security board again shaved the time by seconds, announcing that it was now 90 seconds to midnight.

What’s Next (Or Do I Mean Last)?

In the 76 years since its creation, the minute and second hands of the Doomsday Clock have moved 25 times, back and forth — tick, tock, tick, tock — from 17 minutes to midnight at its furthest from imminent danger to the present 90 seconds to midnight. What lies on the other side of midnight?

On a normal clock, 12:01 would simply begin a new day, a new chance to learn from the past and adjust your path to the future. The question now is whether such a 12:01, a future without the Doomsday Clock, without the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change is even imaginable.

Copyright 2023 Frida Berrigan 

Via Tomdispatch.com

That shouldn’t be surprising, since my parents, Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, once-upon-a-time priest and nun, were well-known antinuclear activists. I was too young to be a part of the “duck-and-cover generation” who, at school, practiced hiding from a nuclear attack beneath their desks or heading for local bomb shelters in the basements of churches and town halls.

Born in 1974, I think of myself as a member of The Day After generation, who were instructed to watch that remarkably popular made-for-TV movie in 1983 and report on our observations and feelings. Dramatizing the life of people in a small town in Kansas after a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, it made a strong (if perhaps unintentional) case that dying in the initial blast would have been better than surviving and facing the nuclear winter and over-armed chaos that followed.

In this Ukraine War era, maybe we could label today’s kids as the Generation Fed Up With Grown Ups (Gen Fed Up). The members of Gen Z are “digital natives,” born with smartphones in their hands and instantly able to spot all the messy seams in, and agendas behind, poorly produced, un-informative Public Service Announcements like the New York City Emergency Management department’s much pilloried recent PSA about what to do in case of — yep, you guessed it! — a nuclear attack: get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned. (Sounds pretty close to the poster on my wall growing up, doesn’t it?)

Young people need real information and analysis, survival skills and resources. Generation Z and the younger Generation Alpha (I have some of both in my family) are growing up in a world torn apart by the selfishness and shortsightedness of earlier generations, including the impact of the never-ending production and “modernization” of nuclear weapons, not to speak of the climate upheaval gripping this planet and all the horrors that go with it, including sea level rise, megadrought, flooding, mass migration, starvation, and on and on and on…

Jornado del Muerto

The nuclear age began during World War II with the July 16, 1945, test of a six-kilogram plutonium weapon code-named Trinity in the Jornado Del Muerto Valley in New Mexico. No one bothered to tell the estimated 38,000 people who lived within 60 miles of that atomic test that it was about to take place or that there might be dangerous nuclear fallout following the blast. No one was evacuated. The area, whose Spanish name in translation means, appropriately enough, Journey of Death, was rich in indigenous culture and life, home to 19 American Indian pueblos, two Apache tribes, and some chapters of the Navajo Nation. Though hardly remembered today, they were the first nuclear casualties of our age.

That initial test was quickly evaluated as successful and, less than a month later, American war planners considered themselves ready for the ultimate “tests” — the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki three days later. The initial blasts from those back-to-back bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people on the spot and immediately thereafter, and countless more from radiation sickness and cancer.

Fat Man and Little Boy, as those bombs were bizarrely code-named, should have signaled the end of nuclear war, even of all war. The incineration of so many civilians and the leveling of two major cities should have been motivation enough to put the cork in the deadly power of the atom and consign nuclear weapons to some museum of horrors alongside the guillotine, the rack, and other past devices of obscene torture.

But it would prove to be just the beginning of an arms race and a cheapening of life that goes on to this day. After all, this country continues to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal to the tune of trillions of dollars, while Vladimir Putin has threatened to use one or more of his vast store of “tactical” nukes, and the Chinese are rushing to catch up. I keep thinking about how 77 years of nuclear brinkmanship and impending doom has taken its global toll, even while making life more precarious and helping render this beautiful and complex planet a garbage can for forever radioactive waste. (Okay, okay, hyperbole alert… it’s not forever, just literally a million years.)

Some among the duck-and-cover generation feared that they wouldn’t live to see adulthood, that there would be no tomorrow. Not surprisingly, too many of them, when they grew up, came to treat the planet as if there indeed were no tomorrow. And you can see evidence of just that attitude any time you consider the “prosperity” of the second industrial revolution with its toxic sludge of fossil fuels, PCBs, asbestos, lead inpaint and gas, and so many plastics. This polluting of our ground, water, and air was all, I suspect, spurred on by a nihilistic nuclearism.

Buy the Book

It seems impossible to work so hard to shift from burning carbon to capturing solar or wind power if there’s a chance that it could all go up in a mushroom cloud tomorrow. But there have been some notable efforts from which to draw hope and inspiration as we keep living out those very tomorrows. As environmentalist and futurist Bill McKibben writes in his memoir The Flag, The Cross and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back on His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What The Hell Happened, President Jimmy Carter tried to guide this country to a less carbon-dependent future — and it cost him the presidency. The Carter White House sought to mitigate the damage of the 1979 oil crisis with significant investments in solar power and other green technologies and cutting-edge conservation. Had such policies been allowed to take hold, as McKibben points out, “climate changes would have turned from an existential crisis to a manageable problem on a list of other problems.”

Can you imagine? We love Carter now for his folksy accessibility, moral stamina, and promotion of affordable housing through Habitat for Humanity, but as we doom-scroll the latest news about present and future climate catastrophes, we have to reach back through time to even imagine a healthier tomorrow. Sadly enough, with Carter, we might have been near a turning point, we might have had a chance… and then actor (and huckster) Ronald Reagan rode his 10-gallon cowboy hat into the White House, removed the rooftop solar panels the Carters had installed, instituted tax cuts for the very wealthy, and loosened regulations on every type of polluter. President Reagan did that in 1986, only a year or so after the last month of our era that the planet was cooler than average.

Tomorrow

1986 seems like just yesterday! Now what? How about tomorrow?

After all, here we are in 2022 about to hit eight billion strong on this planet of ours. And there is, of course, a tomorrow. Hotter and drier but dawning all the same. Wetter and windier but coming anyway.

I have three kids, ages 8, 10 and 15, and they anchor me in a troubling and strange, if still ultimately beautiful, reality. This world, however finite with its increasingly overwhelming problems, is still precious to me and worth a good fight. I can’t turn away from tomorrow. It’s not an abstraction. The headlines now seem to endlessly scream: we are at a potential tipping point in terms of the climate. Did I say a potential tipping point? I meant to make that plural. In fact, an article in the September 8th issue of the Guardian lists 16 of them in all. Sixteen! Imagine that!

Three of the biggest ones that climate scientists agree we’re close to tipping over are:

1. The collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, which will produce a huge rise in global sea levels.

2. The collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic Ocean, which will further disrupt rainfall and weather patterns throughout the world, severely curtailing global food production.

3. The melting of the Arctic’s carbon-rich permafrost, releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and so further broiling this planet. (Will it freeze again if we do the right thing? Not likely, as it seems as if that tipping point has already tipped.)

In the face of all of this, in the age of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and the rest of the crew, how do you change political or corporate behavior to slow, if not reverse, global warming? More than three-quarters of a century of uncertain tomorrows has made the human race — particularly, of course, those in the developed/industrialized world — awful stewards of the future.

“So when we need collective action at the global level, probably more than ever since the second world war, to keep the planet stable, we have an all-time low in terms of our ability to collectively act together. Time is really running out very, very fast.” So said Johan Potsdam, a scientist with the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. As he added tellingly, speaking of the global temperature ceiling set at the Paris climate accords in 2015 (and already considered out of date in the latest devastating United Nations report), “I must say, in my professional life as a climate scientist, this is a low point. The window for 1.5C is shutting as I speak, so it’s really tough.”

Dire predictions, reams of science, sober calls to act from climatologists and activists, not to speak of island and coastal communities already being displaced by a fast-warming world. Only recently, two young people from the climate movement Last Generation threw mashed potatoes at the glass covering a classic Claude Monet painting in a museum near Berlin in a bid to get attention, while activists from Just Stop Oil used tomato soup on the glass of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London in October. In neither case were the paintings themselves harmed; in both cases, they have my attention, for what that’s worth.

For striking numbers of climate refugees globally, the point has already tipped and, given their situations, they might like to have some tomato soup and mashed potatoes — to eat rather than to be flung as protest props. In the longer term, for their children and grandchildren, they need masses of people in the biggest greenhouse gas polluters — China and the United States top the list — to radically alter their lifestyles to help protect what’s left of this distinctly finite planet of ours.

Yesterday

Thomas Berrigan, my grandfather, was born in 1879. My grandmother Frida was born in 1886. While they missed the pre-industrial era by more than 100 years, their early lives in the United States were almost carbon-free. They hauled water, chopped wood, and largely ate from a meager garden. As poor people, their carbon footprint remained remarkably small, even as the pace and pollution of life in the United States and the industrialized West picked up.

My father, Philip Berrigan, born in 1923, was the youngest of six brothers. There could have been two more generations of Berrigans between his birth and mine in 1974, but there weren’t. I could have been a grandmother when I gave birth to my last child in 2014, but I wasn’t. So, in our own way, whether we meant to or not, we slowed down the march of generations and I’m grateful for the long perspective that gives me.

In her later years, my grandmother marveled at the ways in which a car could bring her back and forth to the city “all in one day.” More recently, her great-grandchildren have found that they could still go to school (after a fashion) thanks to computers during the Covid pandemic, communicating in real-time with teachers and classmates scattered elsewhere in our world.

It’s not likely that I’ll live until 2079, my grandfather’s 200th birthday, but his great-granddaughter, my daughter Madeline, will just be turning 65 then. If she has my mother’s longevity, she’ll be 86 when we hit the year 2100, That is the grim milestone (tombstone?) when climate scientists expect that we could reach a disastrous global average temperature of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Unless. Unless something is done, many somethings are done to reverse greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, that spells disaster beyond measure for my children’s children.

When I look at old photos, I see my own face in my mother’s hollowed-out, age-spotted cheeks. And when I look at my daughter’s still chubby cheeks and the way her eyebrows arch, I see my own younger face (and that of my mother’s, too).

As far as I’m concerned, the year 2100 is my future, even though I won’t be here to struggle through it with my children and their children. In the meantime, we keep putting one foot in front of the other (walking is better for the environment anyway) and struggling somehow to deal with this beautiful, broken world of ours. One generation cedes to the next, doing its best to impart wisdom and offer lessons without really knowing what tools those who follow us will need to carve a better tomorrow out of a worsening today.

To go back to the beginning, while such a thing is still possible, if nuclear weapons, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, fossil fuels, and apocalyptic fear helped get us to this breaking point, we need something truly different now. We need not war, but peace; not new nukes, but next-generation-level diplomacy; not fossil fuels, but the greenest of powers imaginable. We need a world that Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and their ilk can’t even imagine, a world where their kind of power is neither needed, nor celebrated.

We need gratitude, humility, and awe at the deep web of interconnection that undergirds the whole of nature. We need curiosity, joy in discovery, and celebration. And our kids (that Gen Fed Up) can help us access those powers, because they’re inherent in all children. So, no more ducking and covering, no more Day After, no more staying inside. Let us learn from Generation Z and Generation Alpha and change — and maybe survive.

Copyright 2022 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

Worse yet, in 2022, it’s emblematic of a far larger picture of life on earth: the stupidity of trying to stay cool while burning carbon; the stupidity of the Supreme Court tying the collective hands of the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to regulating the emissions of coal-fired power plants; the stupidity of blaming mental illness rather than assault rifles for massacres; the stupidity of a pro-life movement that seems to care about nothing but fetuses. And, of course, the list only goes on and on… and on.

And now, I think I’m breaking into a sweat even though I’m sitting still. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver posted this on Facebook recently:

“There are days when I can’t live in this country. Not the whole thing at once, including the hateful parts, the misogyny, the brutal disregard of the powerful for the powerless. Sometimes I can only be a citizen of these trees, this rainy day, the family I can hold safe, the garden I can grow. A fire that refuses to go out.”

So, in these hazy, humid days laced with commercial patriotism and an upbeat jingoism shaken loose from the daily struggles of most people, I’m trying to take her words to heart. I am a citizen of the trees, particularly the two plum trees I planted this spring. I am a citizen of the rainy day. (May it come soon!) I am a citizen of my family of five, of eight, of 16, of 150 (the number of people anthropologist Robin Dunbar says we can meaningfully connect with). Yes, it really does seem like that’s what it takes to go on these days — committing yourself to what matters, to what you still do love in this ever more disturbed America of ours.

Above all, I am a citizen of what I love! I resolve to be a citizen of goodness and generosity, competence and kindness. I pledge allegiance, above all, to libraries, used bookstores, community gardens, and the mutual-aid network of my local “Buy Nothing” group. This, sadly enough, is as much of my country, America, that I seem capable of loving in the age of Donald Trump and an all-too-extreme Supreme Court.

So, in an America in which Roe has gone down and gun sales only continue to rise (thank you so much, Supremes!), let me tell you a little about the things I still truly do love in America.

Used Books Stores

I recently ruined a library book! I spilled coffee all over it and there was no way to fix it. When I contacted the library, I was told that there would be a $30 fine to replace it. There was, however, another option: I could find a new copy and bring it in instead. Well, I have more time than money, so I set off to replace the State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny (a propulsive guilty pleasure of a summer read) that I had caffeinated to the hilt.

After checking out three brick-and-mortar used bookstores in my area I found that novel in no time at all for $1.50 (plus $4.00 shipping) at Alibris, an online used bookstore. But don’t feel bad for the stores that didn’t have a copy of State of Terror. I still spent at least $30 in them, picking up a couple of survival guides, an Octavia Butler novel (another kind of survival guide), graphic novels for my kids, and a few other books that caught my eye — but hopefully won’t catch my next cup of coffee.

Buy the Book

There’s something so wholesome about used bookstores. If the $25 billion-plus publishing industry is a slick, cutthroat insider’s game riven with racism and inequity, then used bookstores are its antithesis. They’re all about the pleasure of knowledge, craft, and the word! Nearest to us here in New London, Connecticut, is the Book Barn in Niantic, a network of three stores loosely organized by theme and covered in cat hair. Their haphazard nature rewards curiosity and perseverance. The mismatched chairs and overturned milk crates invite you to pause, peruse, and dive in. When I go there with my family, we chant “five books are enough” before we get out of the car. Then we revise it to five books each (for a total of twenty-five) and, in the end, are likely to buy as many as we can carry. Given such frenzies, we can only afford to go once every few months even though many of the books are only a dollar each and most are less than five dollars. Honestly, how could you not love it?

Libraries

Excuse me for being so book focused, but that’s who I am, I guess. In between trips to used bookstores, we can always go to the library, where you can borrow 50 titles per card at a time! My kids, 8, 10, and 15, are so well known there that the librarian calls us when they leave behind a favorite stuffed animal or jacket (which is like every week).

The New London library is within walking distance of our house. In addition to books, it has a job-search support center, a recently redesigned teen center, and meeting rooms for local groups and events. Patrons can check out free museum passes, use the free services of a notary, and pose any question under the sun to members of its calm, helpful staff. In addition, our library has a couple of surprising offerings, including Memory Kits for people developing dementia and quite a variety of cake pans shaped like cartoon characters, animals, or castles that can be borrowed like any book.

In this way, our library is very trendy. Like ever more libraries, it’s no longer just focused on lending out books. It’s a multi-use facility that hosts community events, serves as a free or low-priced Staples or a WeWork suite with computers, printers, and study carrels. It lends out Roku devices and laptops, while maintaining catalogs of diverse offerings. My sister-in-law, for instance, borrowed catering equipment like chafing trays and large casserole dishes for her son’s graduation party. At some libraries, you can even borrow lawn mowers, weed whackers, and pruning equipment for your garden and lawn. During prom season, some of them are opening dress-lending libraries to help cash-strapped families get strapless!

It’s all so wholesome and delightful that it’s easy to forget just how underfunded and under attack our libraries are. This in a country where, if you love books, you’ve instantly got financial problems, but if you love the military-industrial complex you’re guaranteed to have more money than you know what to do with. In a nearby town, a first selectman demanded that the library remove a copy of Who Is RuPaul? from its collection in response to a parental complaint.

The book, part of a popular series of biographies, tells the story of the performer, producer, personality, and queer icon whose groundbreaking talent has turned drag-queening into mainstream magic. In Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, members of the right-wing armed hate group Proud Boys have tried to interrupt children’s story hours with vitriol and threats of violence. And yet, despite all the hate, librarians just carry on! The library, a bright, functional, welcoming space meant to exist outside of commerce and to be open to all, is one of the last true public spaces in this country, an enduring part of a shrinking commons!

“Buy Nothing” Facebook Groups

I know. I know. Facebook (now Meta) is big, bad tech. Our every cursor move is tracked, our every “like” logged. I should go on a total social-media fast, but I’m not on Instagram or TikTok and I do love to “like” my friends’ cat pictures! Above all, though, I love “Buy Nothing.” That site-specific network — there are groups everywhere — is built around asking, gifting, and gratitude. It’s online neighborliness personified, demonstrating, in the words of its founders, that “true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors.”

The New London Buy Nothing Group on Facebook has more than 1,500 people. It’s administered by a handful of souls who moderate the page to make sure, among other things, that no one feels badgered into choosing certain people for gifts. In the last few days, some members have offered up cats, organic plant fertilizer, and a toilet seat, while others have asked for vintage drinking glasses, a dog crate, and an old cellphone so a nephew can access the Internet.

People respond to all these queries by asking to be chosen, sometimes sharing why they want whatever’s been asked for and how they’ll use it. The gifters get to choose who to give items to and then they make arrangements to pass them on. When I see someone asking for something that I have in excess, I’ll post a picture of it and invite them to reach out and make a plan to pick it up. Things move pretty quickly then. The only time I had no takers, I was offering used school backpacks the same week that the local Rotary Club was giving out brand new ones filled with school supplies. We’re a friendly, dynamic group that stretches from the nicest homes in New London to the Red Roof Inn, a place people stay when they’re experiencing homelessness.

I love thinking about my front porch as a place where people can come to have their needs and wants met. In the last few months, I’ve shared a women’s history puzzle, a pair of kids’ boxing gloves, a mini-pool full of hostas, jars of sourdough starter, and vegetable stock, while collecting yoga mats, chicken wire, rosary beads, an aquarium, and small jam jars from porches and front steps all over town.

When I refer to “the city” of New London, Connecticut, which was founded in the 1600s and burned down by American traitor turned British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold in 1781, it sounds grand indeed. As it happens, though, we’re now actually a small community of about 28,000 people living in a six-square-mile area. In other words, we’re the size of a town.

New London has been known for lots of things, including its arts scene, bar scene, sugar-sand beach, and being the childhood home of playwright Eugene O’Neill. It’s long and thin like a jalapeño pepper and so small that sometimes it feels like I know everyone. Then I find myself driving down a street I’ve never noticed before, searching for the address of the nice person who’s left me a copy of Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) on their porch in a brown paper bag.

Only 2,882 people voted in our last election, but it seems as if twice that many were actively searching for infant formula during the recent shortage. There’s a level of engagement, gratitude, and celebration on New London’s Buy Nothing Facebook page that I always find moving and delightful, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

Community Gardens

A little head of organic lettuce costs almost $3 these days at my local grocery store. A pound of organic strawberries, imported from Mexico, is about $8. Inflation is the word of the day, week, and year. And nowhere is it more obvious than at the checkout counter of my local grocery store. Like so much in this interconnected, fragile, unequal world of ours, we can blame the soaring cost of food on war and the greed of the corporations that call the tune in the global economy.

But far away from such overwhelming disasters is a modest set of raised garden boxes just up the block from my house. They burst with lettuce, strawberries, and a dozen other easy to harvest “snack” crops. And they’re free for the picking! Hand-painted signs in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic encourage passersby to harvest there and eat the food. The “snack boxes” were built and are maintained by a local food justice and youth empowerment organization called FRESH New London. Passersby can harvest the lettuce and strawberries and bring them home to wash and enjoy. They can pick snap peas, okra pods, and a little later in the summer sweet peppers and blackberries, too.

There are also boxes at the community garden where people can grow their own lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and whatever else they want after accessing water and tools. While they’re at it, they can ask staff members and other gardeners for advice and help.

There are community gardens like ours all over the country, organized by groups of neighbors, non-profit organizations, or even towns and cities. Community gardens are places where we can get our fingernails dirty and our bellies filled with veggies and fruit, while connecting with neighbors, celebrating the beauty of nature, and even providing food for bees and other pollinators.

Of course, people like me can’t grow all our food this way, especially in places like urban Connecticut. Still, producing some of it in such a communal way reminds us that we have the power to feed ourselves and one another. And in these dispiriting times, that should be a strong message of hope!

A (Small) World Free of Nationalism?

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine,” we sometimes sing when our Unitarian Universalist congregation meets. Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote the music more than 100 years ago, while American poet Lloyd Stone provided the words in 1934 to what became the hymn “This Is My Song.” It continues, “But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.” It’s a beautiful piece of music, poignant and full of a love of home that’s somehow radically and beautifully free of nationalism.

The sunlight beams down on used bookstores, libraries, community gardens, and even, however metaphorically, into the dark universe of Meta where there are still people who reject our click-and-buy culture, opting for mutual aid instead. “Buy Nothing!” is the thought lurking there, even if all of this can’t quite stave off the despair that circulates whenever I tune into the wider world of Supreme Court rulings and House January 6th hearings or contemplate why the heat and humidity and stupidity is rising all at once in this forlorn world of ours.

In my own small version of the world, “This Is My Song” is so beloved that my husband and I made it the entrance march at our wedding. It always reminds me that this planet is bigger and more beautiful than nationalism and militarism allow us to see. It reminds me that curiosity and connection form a web that can be stronger than border walls and xenophobia. It reminds me that the small bits of joy and hope that gardens and the gift economy give me is a seed that, with time, nurturing, and hard work, could grow into a more just and equitable future for us all.

So, that’s what I need to remind myself of with each new Supreme Court decision, each crazed statement from Donald Trump or so many other Republicans, each new Cold War moment in our embattled world. It’s good to know that there’s still something I truly do love about this country.

Copyright 2022 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

It’s part of Patrick’s job not to take that — the most personal of insults and an almost universal expression of disrespect — personally. He knew enough about that boy and his sad story to see the truth of the maxim “hurt people hurt.” In this case, it was also a matter of “disrespected kids disrespect.” So, he handled it and his emotional response to the grossness of being spit on, too. He got that kid down and back into class. Then he cleaned himself up and went on with his day.

This is not the first time he’s been spit on this year and it probably won’t be the last. It isn’t even the worst. Once, he was so covered in spittle he had to go home in the middle of the day to shower and change clothes. And mind you, this is all happening during the coronavirus pandemic and the mandatory mask wearing that is supposed to keep his school safe (at least from the virus).

Taking the Time

My husband’s official job title — and I’ll bet you didn’t even know such a job existed — is Wellness Interventionist. (Another school calls his position the Feelings Teacher.) He works at one of our Connecticut town’s four public elementary schools, trying to keep things from getting overheated. He attempts to intervene in conflicts between kids before they come to a head. He leads class-circle discussions about emotional health, and helps students find more complex and nuanced ways than just anger or derision to express their feelings. They are supposed to seek him out for help navigating conflicts and repairing relationships.

There’s a jargonistic term for what he does: “restorative practices and social-emotional learning.” Because he works in a bureaucracy, you won’t be surprised to know that these terms have been reduced to the acronyms RP and SEL. However fast those may be to say, though, the work itself takes time, lots and lots of time, and time is the one thing my husband seldom has in his fast-moving school days with almost 500 kids needing attention.

He’ll sit down with two kids at odds with each another and just as they get to the crux of the matter, a call comes in over his walkie talkie that a student has “eloped” (the term of art for escaping the building) and is running towards the road. He’ll be about to connect with a youngster struggling with too many grown-up-sized problems at home, when a teacher urgently calls him to a classroom to help manage a fourth grader’s water-bottle-throwing tantrum.

What choice does he have? In that case, he promised the student with the home problems that he’d continue their conversation at lunch and sprinted for the classroom. Patrick entered the room with a smile on his face. In a calm voice he said, “Okay, friends, we are going to give X some space now, so please go with your teacher to the library.” He helped her usher the boy’s fearful, dumbstruck classmates out of the room. “See you in a little bit,” he said in his most reassuring voice, before turning to that flailing, furious youngster.

With the rest of the students gone, the temper tantrum was no longer a performance and so the two of them ended up working for almost an hour cleaning up the mess. As they set tables upright, wiped up spilled water, and taped torn posters back on walls, Patrick got the kid talking about the problems that had all too literally exploded out of his small body. No, my husband couldn’t fix them, but he offered a little perspective and some tools for managing anger more constructively. He then reached out to the school’s psychiatrist and social worker, while offering support to the family.

And yes, I may not be the most objective witness, but Patrick is really good at his job — patient, friendly, and ready to help. When he needs to restrain kids intent on hurting themselves or others, he does so with a sense of moderation and equanimity right out of the “safety care” training manual.

His problem, though, is time in a school and a system that, during the pandemic, hasn’t had enough teachers or para-educators or aides — and, all too typically, is losing more of them. The school’s psychiatrist just left for a better (less dangerous) job and the principal recently announced that she’s leaving at the end of the school year. There are a dozen teachers looking for new jobs or planning on early retirement. And yes, there are other staff trained to deal with aspects of his job, but it’s hard because too many of them aren’t fully capable of dealing withthephysical demands of the job. He has colleagues who are pregnant, smaller than some of the fourth graders, or older enough not to want to risk an injured back or knee from chasing or restraining kids.

A Failure for Sure — But Whose?

All too often these days, my husband comes home sad, tired, and dispirited. Unfortunately, his feelings and experiences are just one person’s tale in the sweeping epic of a failing and floundering school system. Or maybe it’s not just that system, but our whole society.

You probably won’t be surprised to know that public schools have been in perpetual crisis for a long time. Fill in the blank for the calamity of your choice: from once-upon-a-time segregated schools and federal agents escorting Black youngsters to school to today’s fights over which bathroom kids should use and who plays on what volleyball team. Schools have long been the culture war’s battlefield of choice.

Why is there public education and what is its purpose? If the original system was built and funded at public expense to prepare the next generation of factory workers, today’s system is there so that parents can work. Covid-19 revealed that sad truth. When schools shut down, so does part of the economy. These days, they also provide a whole array of social support for families badly in need, often including food, clothes, health care, and access to technology.

Buy the Book

The pandemic shutdowns revealed failures and weaknesses in a threadbare social system, but it did allow certain strengths to shine through as well. For one thing, the commitment of so many teachers, para-educators, and support staff, often under remarkably difficult circumstances, should be considered a marvel. Our educators are the under-appreciated, underpaid, undervalued superheroes of the Covid era. They transitioned to a new medium of education, the virtual classroom, and figured out how to mobilize the sort of resources that students and their families need just to keep going. School buses delivered computers, lunches, and dinners. Teachers made themselves available after hours to walk families through the new technology of schooling, even though they often had kids of their own and elders to care for as well. And they did it all for far too long amid the Trump administration’s dismal culture wars!

They worked on an emergency, pedal-to-the-metal footing for three semesters before going back to in-person instruction in the fall of 2021, with masks, plexiglass barriers, and the constant threat of shutdowns. They started the school year stressed and tired, and now, in April 2022, they’re exhausted.

Rage or Gratitude (or Both?)

You would think all of this would make a deep impression on my own children, one in second grade and the other in fourth, who can sometimes see their father in the hallways of their school. When it comes to school, though, our two kids are in their own world — one of new books and good friends. At dinner, when we say grace, they’re forever praising their teachers. As far as they know, school is going great. I wouldn’t have it any other way, so out of their earshot Patrick and I try to talk through his hard days.

In the face of it all, I feel both inchoate rage and extravagant gratitude. The rage is easier. Patrick is dealing with many layers of trauma and tragedy all at once in the minds and bodies of five to 12-year-olds. It should surprise no one that, after 18 months of virtual “learning” and social isolation, kids are having a hard time reacclimating.

Educators don’t know everything that happened to every kid between March 2020 and September 2021, but they know enough to be sure that it was often bleak: many had family members who lost jobs or even died. Some moved into far smaller living spaces with more people or found themselves left alone for long periods of time with just the Internet and all its dark corners for company.

I was so relieved when our kids went back to school, but I wished that more time had been spent on reconnection, community rebuilding, and healing. Of course, I wasn’t in charge and had to watch helplessly as, in September 2021, they instantly went back to standardized testing.

I blame the school system for charging full steam ahead over the minds and bodies of the youngest, most vulnerable members of our community. Yet I’m grateful as well. It’s so confusing! In spite of everything, my kids are so happy to be back and I find myself surprised, impressed, and moved by what they bring home to share.

Time Is Money

Everyone has ideas about how to improve our schools and can point a finger at those they blame for the failures in that system: absent or omnipresent parents, video games and social media, cops in schools (as symbols of public safety or emblems of the “school-to-prison” pipeline), and that’s just to begin down an endless list.

Wherever you want to lay the blame, the solution isn’t hard to find, it’s just expensive.

An administrator told Patrick that the way to fix our schools would be to have each teacher and aide deal with a class of just 12 students, with plenty of time for exercise, recess, and the arts. Indeed, that would undoubtedly fix many of the problems Patrick faces daily, because so much of his work involves putting out fires long after they’ve broken out. In a class of 12, a teacher would be able to give any smoldering kid attention — and some choices.

However, we already do invest a lot of money in our schools with anything but the greatest results. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States spent $14,100 per elementary and secondary student in 2017 — 37% more than the average of $10,300 paid by member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 “highly developed” wealthy nations. On that list, only Luxembourg, Austria, and Norway seem to spend more than the U.S. does, but the academic performance numbers of many of those countries are so much better than ours.

Why? To explore the all-too-complicated answer to that question, you would undoubtedly have to dive into this country’s brutal history of the transatlantic slave trade and racism, Calvinist notions of who deserves to succeed, and so many other factors. But given my own background, I tend to think about it in terms of Washington’s military budget — in terms, that is, of how poorly we invest staggering sums of our taxpayer dollars. After all, it’s not just how much you spend, it’s how you spend it! In our case, prodigiously on war and preparations for more of it, rather than on our children.

The United States spends so much more on its military than any other country (more than the next 11 countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and we still aren’t safer, not faintly so. When we “invest” more than $800 billion annually in the military-industrial complex, as President Joe Biden proposes to do in 2023, there are a lot of things we can’t afford that would actually make us safer. Money wasted on the military doesn’t get spent on mental health — unsurprisingly, the man who attacked that Brooklyn subway car, injuring 23 people, suffered from mental illness — and it doesn’t get spent on gun-safety measures either. According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 12,000 people have been killed by guns so far this year alone in this disastrously over-armed nation of ours. How can we even say that we’re a nation at peace, given the endless violence and mass killings that embroil us?

And guns aren’t the only thing killing us either. While we spend so much on military infrastructure, we don’t repair the rest of our infrastructure adequately. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives that civil infrastructure (roads, bridges, parks, water systems, etc.) a C-minus grade and estimates the spending needed there at $2.59 trillion. Finally, military spending hampers our ability to respond to genuine threats to safety and security like the coronavirus pandemic, which has already killed nearly a million Americans (and likely many more than that).

Education suffers, too. While the U.S. toolbox may be full of hammers, kids aren’t nails. And while federal education spending is relatively high, it’s spent all too politically instead of going where it’s most needed. Take New London, Connecticut, where I live, for example. I looked up what we get per student per year and it was more than I thought: $16,498 (with $1,210 coming from the federal government and the rest from the state and local taxes).

Nonetheless, we’re a poor community. The median income for a household in New London is about $47,000, well below the national average, and we have a home ownership rate of less than 40%. So many families in our school district qualify for free or reduced lunch that they just give every kid free lunch (and breakfast and a snack, too) without any paperwork. A lot of the students in our public schools are“English Language Learners” (ELL), meaning they speak another language at home and need additional support to learn the material in math or social studies as they are also learning English. Many of them also have “Individualized Education Plans” (IEPs) indicating that, with an attention-deficit or learning disability, they need extra support and accommodation to learn. A not-so-small minority of students are ELL with IEPs. All that adds up to a lot of need and a lot of extra expense.

We should get more resources because our needs are high, but perversely enough, the needier a school district is, the fewer resources it gets, because in so many parts of the country education spending is pegged to property taxes. Chester, Connecticut, is just 20 miles away from here, but it might as well be in another world. Their schools spend $24,492 per student and have very few English-language learners in that very white small community.

In our town, until the pandemic shut down the schools, one of the elementary schools did double duty as a food pantry once a month. The food line would then snake around the building, including parents, grandparents, and people coming straight from work (among them, custodians, cooks, and teachers from that very building). No one got paid enough to turn down a free box of food toward the end of the month.

I helped out there sometimes and one thing struck me: the news media never showed up. Not a single reporter. That line of 200 or more people who needed food badly enough to spend a few hours there at the end of a workday just wasn’t a big enough deal. If doctors had lined up around the hospital in a similar fashion, or engineers and scientists employed at our local weapons manufacturer, General Dynamics, maybe that would have been news. But poor schools, poor people… nothing new there.

It’s Not Fair

With his limited resources, Patrick is part social worker, part social connector, part bouncer, part enforcer, and part small-group facilitator. An administrator who makes three times his salary saw him in action recently and said, “We should have five of you!” And she was right. That school does need more people like him. Her tone, though, was wistful, as if she were hoping for a unicorn for Christmas. Of course, having the resources to pay people who are going to help create the conditions under which children will learn in an optimal fashion shouldn’t be a fairy tale.

That kid on the windowsill probably needed more than any school could give him. He probably needed a grief counselor and a psychiatrist, a safe place to live and a good night’s sleep, glasses, shoes that fit, and a warmer jacket, too. And the one thing he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t get what he needed and it pissed him off. In that moment, I suspect school stuff was far from his mind. He undoubtedly wasn’t worrying about his math scores or his reading level. My best guess is that he wasn’t thinking about the consequences of his actions either, like being sent to the principal’s office or getting suspended. From what Patrick said afterward, it sounded like the kid was enraged, suffering, deeply sad, over-stimulated, out of options, and couldn’t believe that any adult would listen to him express his problems with words alone.

Schools can’t solve all of this society’s problems. But every day, my kids’ teachers show up and try, just as Patrick does. It’s not fair, it’s not working particularly well, but it does make a difference and that’s better than the alternative.

Copyright 2022 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com