KATHY
KELLY | “WOULD YOU LIKE A DRINK OF WATER?” PLEASE ASK A YEMENI CHILD.
June 23, 2017 · by Rise Up Times ·
in Activism, climate change, Militarism, U.S. Foreign Policy · 1 Comment
This
week, in New York City, representatives from more than 100 countries will begin
collaborating on an international treaty, first proposed in 2016, to ban
nuclear weapons forever.
By Kathy Kelly World Beyond War
June 20, 2017
It makes sense for every country in the world to seek
a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons. It would make even more sense to
immediately deactivate all nuclear weapons. But, by boycotting and disparaging
the process now underway, the U.S. and other nuclear armed nations have sent a
chilling signal. They have no intention of giving up the power to explode, burn
and annihilate planetary life. “The United States is spending $1 trillion
USD over the next thirty years to modernize its nuclear weapon arsenals and
triple the killing power of these weapons,” says Ray Acheson, programme
director at Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Acheson
also notes that the excessive spending for nuclear weapons contrasts with U.S.
cuts to vital anti-poverty programs. On June 19th, more than a dozen people
blocked the U.S. Mission to the UN entrance to protest Washington’s
boycott of the negotiations. They were arrested for disorderly conduct, but I
believe it’s incomparably more disorderly to plan for nuclear war.
During the past weekend, to support the negotiations for a treaty
banning nuclear weapons, WILPF called for “Women’s March to Ban the Bomb”
actions in cities across the U.S. and around the world. Jane Addams, who
helped found the League in 1919, was a Chicago woman who understood the crucial
need to put an end to war, all war, and instead care for the neediest people.
She dedicated herself to assuring that many new immigrants in her city were
treated with respect, given assistance to meet basic needs and encouraged to
live and work together, peaceably. Addams worked passionately to prevent nations
from sleepwalking into the horrors of World War I, and she vigorously
campaigned to stop the United States’ entry into it.
Upon return from visiting soldiers who had been maimed while
fighting in the trenches of World War I, she spoke of how the young men
couldn’t have carried on the war without mind-altering substances -sometimes
absinthe, sometimes extra rations of rum. Families were sending laudanum and
even heroin to the front lines in hampers. The
soldiers couldn’t kill, she concluded, if left in their right minds.
The WILPF gatherings help us ask hard questions about our capacity
to prepare for massive obliteration of entire cities, through nuclear weapon
buildup, while failing to meet the needs of children, like those in Yemen,
whose survival is jeopardized by war and indifference. Can we persist in
perfecting our nuclear arsenals, indifferent to millions of children at risk of
starving to death or dying because they lack clean water — and because U.S.
supported Saudi airstrikes decimate the infrastructure that might have supplied
food and water, –can we do so and claim to be in our right minds?
WILPF gathered us in Chicago where we took time to remember a
remarkably brave former Chicagoan, Jean Gump, a mother of twelve whose altruism
led her to help dismantle an intercontinental ballistic missile. On March 28,
1986, Jean and her companions in the Plowshares movement enacted the biblical
call to turn swords into plowshares. Picture it in the words of Lila Sarick’s
article, “The Crime of Ms. Jean Gump:”
The early morning sun was beginning to glow red
over the horizon as a trio ran through the dew-soaked Missouri field.
Silently, a young, bearded man cut the
chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, while his two companions, another man
and a woman, hung banners beside the scarlet sign that warned them not to
enter.
Beside the warning sign, the pair hung a photo
collage of the woman’s 12 children and 2 grandchildren. Alongside it, they hung
a pennant that bore the group’s logo: “Swords into plowshares — an act of
healing.”
The trio then clambered through the hole in the
fence and entered M-10, a Minuteman II missile site at Whiteman Air Force Base,
Knob Noster, Missouri.
The missile site resembled an abandoned railway
yard. Rust-colored tracks ended abruptly in the middle of the site. Tall signal
arms and white concrete bunkers dotted the landscape.
Wordlessly, the three set to work. Ken
Rippetoe, 23, swung a sledgehammer at the railway tracks, designed to launch a
nuclear missile with the punch of one million tons of TNT.
Larry Morlan, 26, snipped the wires on the
signal arms, which pointed blindly toward the sky.
And Jean Gump uncapped a baby bottle filled
with the trio’s blood and poured it in the shape of a cross on the gleaming
hatch from which a missile could emerge. Underneath, she painted the words
“Disarm and live.”
For this action, Jean Gump was sentenced to 4 ½ years in prison.
The following year, her husband, Joe Gump, performed a similar action,
believing Jean was right about assuming personal responsibility to deactivate
nuclear weapons. The couple galvanized a group of Midwesterners to form a 1988
campaign, the “Missouri Peace Planting,” which involved dozens of people
climbing over barbed wire fences onto the grounds of nuclear weapon silos in
Missouri, and planting corn on top of the missile silos. I remember
entering a nuclear weapon site in Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base, planting
corn, and shortly thereafter finding myself kneeling in the grass, handcuffed,
as a soldier stood behind me with his weapon pointed toward me. I lasted about
two minutes in silence, and then started talking about why we did what we did
and how we hoped the action would benefit children that he loved as well. And
then I asked him, “Do you think the corn will grow?”
“I don’t know,” he responded, “but I sure hope so.” And then he
asked me, “Ma’am, would you like a drink of water?” I nodded
eagerly. “Ma’am,” said the soldier, “would you please tip your head
back.” I did so, and he poured water down my throat. Recalling his kind offer
to give me water jolts me into awareness about the relationship between the
nuclear weapon below us, that day, and massive numbers of people, then and now,
who acutely need clean water.
Imagine if his question, “Would you like a drink of water?” were
asked, today, to people living in Yemen. Now, as the U.S. insists on having an
exceptional right to dominate the planet, insists on being armed with enough
explosive fire power to obliterate entire cities, suppose we were to ask people
in Yemen, millions of whom now face cholera and starvation, if they would like
a drink of clean, pure water?
Or, let’s bring the question closer to home and ask people in Flint,
MI, whose water is contaminated, “Would you like clean, pure water?”
And as we grope for solutions to the signs of climate change,
including severe droughts and the rush to privatize dwindling resources of
potable water, imagine asking the children of future generations, “Would you
like a drink of water?”
President Eisenhower was
right to equate possession of nuclear weapons with commission of crime.
Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its
scientists, the hopes of its children.
It’s a big “ask”: get rid of nuclear weapons. Along with
planning and joining protests, another way to remain awake and focused on
preventing nuclear annihilation involves recognizing how interconnected we are with
others, so much so that the suffering and death of another person diminishes
our own lives.
This wakefulness entails abiding care for others. Jean Gump and
Jane Addams practiced such care throughout most of their lives. We, likewise,
can work toward justice for those who live in communities like Flint, MI; we
can seek sane approaches to the climate crisis; and we can insist that those
who are targets of war, like the cholera-ridden, desperately hungry children of
Yemen, be spared from aerial terrorism and given full access to clean,
life-saving waters.
Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org)
co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)
RELATED
“The ‘apocalyptic’ chess game between the
superpowers that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our
civilization, is being played according to the rule ‘if either “wins” it is the
end of both’; it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games
preceded it. Its ‘rational’ goal is deterrence, not victory, and the arms race,
no longer a preparation for war, can now be justified only on the grounds that
more and more deterrence is the best guarantee of peace. To the question how
shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this
position, there is no answer. — Hannah Arendt, On Violence
(See ICANW.org and WomenAgainstMilitaryMadness.org for
an answer.)
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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