Two-Minded World

This morning as I drank my cup of tea I flipped through the pages of Sunset magazine with its beautiful pictures of gardens and nature hikes and fabulousfood; and I envied those who have gardens, who go camping in spectacular places, who can afford these furnishings, these homes.

Then I reminded myself of the many people struggling with chronic illness, or raising a child with birth defects, or suffering crushing poverty.

On the floor where it had fallen from my dining table was my unopened copy of TriValleyCARES newsletter. I reached over to pick it up.

TriValleyCARES is the watchdog group that keeps a steady eye on Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. I am getting ready to move back to California, and will be only about an hour from LLNL, in a lovely area of Sonoma County where most people forget completely about nuclear weapons laboratories. They manage to be more oblivious of the menace than people here, who live in a state that seems dedicated to the military goals of this militaristic nation, especially nuclear.

In New Mexico we have two national nuclear laboratories within an hour of one another. We have one of the largest nuclear waste disposal sites, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, WIPP. Of course we also have the Trinity Test Site, where the first nuclear bomb was exploded in 1945, a historic site. We have a plant where uranium is processed, and of course we have uranium mines, and the ever-present threat of new uranium mining. We’re surrounded.

Not that California doesn’t have its share, home to Lockheed Corporation for example. Do you live in a state where there is no contamination from nuclear reactors? I also just read that the tanks in Hanford, Washington, are leaking…

So, this is our world.

On the one hand, we have hikes up in the stunning Sierra mountains; on the other, we have nuclear weapons being designed and manufactured, and leaking their toxic garbage into our water supply.

Taking the TriValleyCARES newsletter into the bathroom, I learned something new about plutonium pit manufacture planned for the Los Alamos Lab.

It seems that pits manufactured in Los Alamos are going to be transported to Livermore to be burnished and finished and then transported back to Los Alamos!

I can’t think of anything more stupid, unless it is something I learned from the movie “The Economics of Happiness,” which I watched on my computer last night, that nations now export foodstuffs like eggs and tomatoes while at the same time importing the same foods to feed their own people!

The miles traveled by foods in a time of diminishing fuel supplies where corporations drive the compulsion to obtain what we “need” by frakking is wasteful and stupid enough, but how about sending plutonium pits back and forth on the beautiful highways of the West?

Does that sound fiscally responsible? Or SAFE?

Reading this article reminded me of something I read last night about Obama’s budget proposal. Here it is, from Democracy Now! –

The Obama administration has been accused of backtracking on vows to move toward nuclear disarmament following reports it plans to spend more than $10 billion to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. The plan would extend the life of U.S. nuclear B61 gravity bombs stored in Europe and apply new tail fins to make the bombs into guided weapons. Joseph Cirincione, head of the nuclear arms control group the Ploughshares Fund, told The Guardian: “The billions of dollars we are lavishing on the B61 is criminal. This is billions of dollars spent on a weapon whose mission evaporated at the end of the cold war,” he said.

Not only is our Great Emancipator willing to spend billions on this project while agreeing to strip funds from unrelated budgets for Social Security and MediCare, but these B61 bombs are 50 megatons – three times the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima – and said to be “more useable” because they will allegedly create “less fallout” due to releasing less debris into the atmosphere.

I’m so happy that these monstrosities, which will devastate any city on which they are dropped, will release less radioactive fallout to pollute the atmosphere over the United States of America, which is always on the side of the Good, and only goes to war to promote peace.

Norman Solomon nailed it when he said, “War becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace.”

That movie, War Made Easy, is something else I watched last night on the Internet.

This is my life, your life, in today’s crazy world. Between these two realities, we struggle to stay sane, raise children, earn a living, and read labels on bread and other staples when we stop at the grocery store on the way home.

On the one hand, we have people watching movies on huge TVscreens in their California backyards, and on the other, we have governments subsidizing – with our tax money! — the design and production of bombs of enormous murderous capacity.

In the gap between these two realities, people scattered all over the world are trying to create a “new paradigm,” and new ways of living based on that paradigm that will make it possible for us to survive on this deeply endangered planet.

The crisis is real, and it’s urgent. What are we willing to do in order to restore our planet and ensure that life is possible for our children and grandchildren?

Says Vandana Shiva, “We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth, or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

Let’s go, women of the world. Time for The Uprising.