What’s worse than being beaten senseless by a big bully? Watching the beating, weapon in hand but doing nothing to stop it. Well, nearly nothing. Nothing useful. Nothing that will save the victim. It’s like being “pistol whipped”. Come to the victim’s aid and you’ll be shot dead. Today’s bully needs to have nuclear weapons and use murder/suicide as a threat. I have no choice but to watch you injure and kill, maim and impoverish innocents. Any move to stop you would bring much more death. The inexorable logic of our nuclear MADness leads to this helplessness. Unless we find a way. There is only so much dumb luck available and we’ve used a lot getting 77 years into the nuclear age unscathed. In my old age I sometimes wonder if living is just running out the clock. Letting the arrow of time fly. Counting ticks toward the game’s end. It would be ironic (everything is anymore) if another clock was moving toward our collective end. Is my clock a minute slow? Is my clock giving me a false idea that its not so late after all? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a clock. A famous clock with hands frozen at 100 seconds before midnight. That metaphoric midnight would be the end of the day for our civilization. I’d like to be guilty of touting gloom and doom without cause. I’m not. The man who controls the majority of the world’s nuclear warheads has twice in the last few days threatened to use them. If you’ve read this far, imagine in your head, the credits rolling and Dame Vera Lynn singing “We’ll meet again”. This was the ending of the 1964 Kubrick film, “Doctor Strangelove”. The meeting she alluded to was to be in the afterlife. Good luck.
CSB 