[LEMONS] 3.14.2002
It's another great Fiore cartoon. The only thing is, I'm not sure whether to laugh, or invest in land in the Australian outback.
I just started reading Genius : The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. (I read Feynman's book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman a long time ago, when I was in junior high, I think. I've been meaning to read more about him ever since, but am only now getting around to it.) I found a passage in the prologue very disturbing in light of the administration's recent nuclear saber-rattling.
"[Feynman] felt he possessed a knowledge that set him alone and apart. It gnawed at him that ordinary people were living their ordinary lives oblivious to the nuclear doom that science had prepared for them. Why build roads and bridges meant to last a century? If only they knew what he knew, they surely would not bother."
I (along with many others my age who grew up reading Alas, Babylon
and On the Beach , and watching The Day After on their television sets) grew up terrified of nuclear war. When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union during my freshman year at college, I felt like I had won a reprieve of some sort. I remember Emory University college president James Laney addressing my freshman class, and telling us how fortunate we were to be the first class in two generations to enter college without the specter of nuclear war hanging over our heads. It made me feel exuberant.
But Laney was wrong.
What did those men imagine? Those geniuses of the desert. What did they dream of, in the pitch black night after The A-Bomb fell upon Hiroshima? Did they dream of the end of the world? Did they dream of the everlasting winter in the years and decades that followed the explosion. The men are dead, but their gift lives on. And we take it for granted now. We've lived with it for fifty-plus years, since the time before the dawn of suburbs and Proctor and Gamble Television advertisements. After the Cold War ended, I think too many of us began to take The Threat for granted. It has passed, we thought. It was a relic. Our nuclear arsenal a quaint reminder of another era.
Not so. Not so.
Nuclear weapons can yet destroy our planet and everything that lives upon it. If we encourage their proliferation, if we take cavalier attitudes towards their development and deployment, we risk everything and gain nothing.
Good God. My wife and I, we're so young. We've got this whole world, this whole giant spinning green and blue ball, laid out ahead of us. We've got so much to do, so much to see. When I was a young man, I always wanted to die before I got old. But not now. Not now that I know love. I just want to live a full, long natural life. And that grey-suited men, who have already had the opportunity to do just that, would deprive us of our chance, infuriates me.
- l i n k -
