The ongoing call for
nuclear abolition at Los Alamos
Rev. John Dear
August 5, 2019
This week, we drove
back up the remote New Mexico mountains to the “atomic city” for our annual
peace vigil, sit in and rally. This was our 16th year
in a row. Every time I go to Los Alamos, I’m shocked all over again by its
beauty, its normalcy–and its frightening, zombie-like culture of death.
For me, Los Alamos
remains the world’s greatest terrorist camp, its most sinister place, the
embodiment of evil. For while the people are good, and the surrounding cliffs,
rocks, forests and mountains are stunning, the National Laboratories where we
spend hundreds of billions to build nuclear weapons is the most evil place on
earth. There we prepare for the end of the world like it was a perfectly normal
thing to do. There our despair reaches its climax and we give in to our
addiction to death and say, go ahead, blow the whole thing up.
Los Alamos (John Dear)
But the drive up the
mountain presents a gorgeous view. The two lane road takes you along sheer
rocky cliffs on one side of a majestic canyon. Far down below you can see pine
trees, junipers and sagebrush across the canyon floor. Across the way, stands
the other side of the canyon wall—a wall of light brown, almost orange and
white mysterious rock.
It’s a hot August day,
but as usual massive white rain clouds tower overhead threatening rain, as they
do this time of year. Oppenheimer picked this remote place precisely because no
one would ever make the trek up here. Few still do.
(John Dear)
When you reach the top,
a large sign greets you: “Welcome to Los Alamos—where discoveries are made.” We
gathered for our annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki commemoration at Ashley Pond Park,
the exact place where long ago the Hiroshima bomb was built by Oppenheimer and
his mad scientists. Now the streets honor that proud achievement with names
like Oppenheimer Drive and Trinity Drive.
This year we noticed
that the National Park Service has taken over Ashley Pond Park, and set up a
little visitor’s center which celebrates the atomic bomb. You would never know
it was ever detonated. No, there are no photos of the 200,000 sisters and
brothers killed 74 years ago. No, there is no hint of regret or a commitment to
make sure these atrocities never happen again. To me, it would be like visiting
the Auschwitz museum and finding the museum approved what happen. I told the
friendly park ranger that I found the whole thing quite disturbing, and that we
were going outside to protest this mad rush to death. He laughed out loud.
I step outside into the
park and lightning strikes the surrounding hills. Dark clouds hover over head
and thunder breaks the silence every few minutes. A light drizzle starts. We
decide, at over 7000 feet above sea level, that it’s too dangerous to be walking
around during these lightning strikes, so we cancel the walk, and gather near
the stage area by Ashley Pond for our witness.
We pick up a peace
sign, put on sackcloth, and pour ashes on the nearby ground, and sit for thirty
minutes of silent prayer to repent of the mortal sin of nuclear weapons, as the
people of Ninevah did long ago according to the Book of Jonah. We beg the God
of peace for the gift of nuclear disarmament. We look ridiculous, of course,
but unbeknownst to passers-by, we have undertaken a symbolic
spiritual/political act of protest–the oldest known form of protest in history.
Then we heard from our
speakers. Jay Coghlan of Nukewatch New Mexico talked about the seriousness and
stupidity of the Trump Administration’s decision last week to pull out of the
Arms Control Treaty, a decision that has gotten lost in all the other bad news
(see: www.nukewatch.org). Joni Arends of Concerned
Citizens for Nuclear Safety New Mexico spoke of the latest shenanigans by the
Labs, to bypass the legal oversight of its water purification system so that
plutonium contaminated water can continue to poison the land (see: www.nuclearactive.org).
Alicia from Nukewatch explained the latest progress with the U.N. treaty to
outlaw nuclear weapons, organized by the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winning group,
the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (see: www.icanw.org).
Since we were a small
group of forty or so, we took turns sharing our reflections on this solemn
occasion, from our experience of sitting at the place where the Original Bomb
was built, to our personal efforts for peace. One friend spoke of the money
spent by the city of Los Alamos to beautify the park. “I hate all this beauty,”
she said through her tears, “because it covers up all the evil that happened
here and continues to happen here.” Everyone nodded in agreement.
Last year we started to
hold regular organizing meetings to plan our events for next year, August 6-9,
2020, when we will mark the 75th anniversary
of the Trinity test, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, and 9, 2020, we plan
to walk around Ashley Pond Park, perhaps 500 of us or more, and then join hands
in silence to mark the occasion, then hold a rally with speakers and music.
In between those days,
we will hold the Campaign Nonviolence National Conference in Albuquerque with
speakers including actor Martin Sheen, Civil Rights leader Dolores Huerta,
religious leader Rev. Richard Rohr, social scientist Dr. Erica Chenoweth, Rev.
Lennox Yearwood of the HipHop Caucus, myself and others.
I invited Beatrice
Finn, leader of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, to fly
from Geneva next year to speak to us. She wrote me that the Mayor of Hiroshima
had also invited her to speak, so she would be in Japan during that time. She
recommended we invited Dr. Ira Helfand of ICAN to speak instead and he gladly
accepted.
But Beatrice Finn also
said, in effect, that on August 6 and 9, 2020, there’s only two places to be on
the planet—Hiroshima, Japan, or Los Alamos, New Mexico, calling for the total
abolition of nuclear weapons.
We encourage everyone
not going to Japan next year to make places to join our national march and
commemorations in Los Alamos, NM. (For details and to register, visit: www.paceebene.org/cnvconference2020). I hope
every peace, justice and environmental group in the national can send a
delegation.
(John Dear)
Only later did we learn
that while we were praying and speaking out for nuclear disarmament in Los
Alamos through our public nonviolent witness and action, down the road on highway
25 south, just pass Las Cruces, NM, into El Paso, Texas, a gunman was opening
fire on people at the local Walmart. It was a blatant racist, anti-immigrant,
terrorist massacre, fueled by the hatred of the racist president and the racist
Republican party. Like everyone, I grieve for all those killed and injured in
El Paso, Dayton and elsewhere, and I see a direct connection between Los Alamos
and El Paso and the insanity of our gun violence and nuclear violence.
The sick people who
prevent gun control and support AK47s are the same people who support the
building and maintenance of nuclear weapons, which put millions of people at
risk from some unimaginable massacre to come. The sickness of our widespread
gun violence epidemic is connected to the sickness of the nuclear weapons
industry, and the numbness and despair among us allow these lethal epidemics to
threaten us all.
We need to wake each
other up, now more than ever, and speak out and resist violence in all its
forms, and call for a new culture of nonviolence, where not only ban machine
guns and nuclear weapons, we fund decent jobs, housing, education, healthcare,
and dignity for all people everywhere—and nonviolent conflict resolution as the
way forward.
In September,
CampaignNonviolence.org will organize over 3,000 marches, rallies, and public
events across the U.S. during our national
week of action (Sept. 14-22) against a wide array of
issues—racism, war, poverty, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction—to
call for a new culture of justice, peace and nonviolence. We want to keep the
movement moving; connect the dots between the various struggles; put our
nonviolence into practice; and build up the global grassroots movement of
creative nonviolence. It’s the way change has always happened—when ordinary
people take public action through bottom up people power grassroots movements.
Join us! (www.campaignnonviolence.org)
It’s strange, but
later, driving back down the mountain, after a day of meetings, and now an
afternoon of public witnessing for peace, I felt oddly consoled, grateful, even
hopeful. One would not expect that after looking Hiroshima and Los Alamos in
the eye.
I recalled the words of
my friend and teacher to me long ago–Fr. Daniel Berrigan: “If you want to be
hopeful, you have to do hopeful things.”
So we go forward, doing
our small hopeful things, no matter what, hoping for the best, come what may.
And we take heart once more.
This story was produced by Campaign
Nonviolence
Rev. John Dear is an
internationally known voice for peace and nonviolence and is on the staff at
Campaign Nonviolence. A priest, peacemaker, organizer, lecturer, and retreat
leader, he is the author or editor of 30 books, including his autobiography, “A
Persistent Peace.”
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"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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