Nukes! Nukes!!!

by shamanic

I've been light on posting because I had to tie about 75 loose ends up at work last week, about 65 of them unexpected, before leaving for a week-long vacation at the National Poetry Slam in a couple of days. I've spent a very relaxing weekend cleaning, doing laundry, recording audio, doing some basic home repairs, and generally trying to set myself up to a) leave, and b) come home again next Sunday to a relatively clean house.

While doing mountains of laundry this morning, I happened to watch 2002's "The Sum of All Fears", which prominently features the nuking of Baltimore.

Nukes have been much on my mind of late, what with Tom Tancredo calling for the utter destruction of world holy sites should crazies attack us, Barack Obama's call for the (non-nuclear) bombing of Pakistan, and then later Obama's unclear remarks about nukes (on the table? off the table? under discussion? not so much?).

If I could just jump in as, like, a member of the human race and a citizen of the only nation on Earth that has ever used nuclear weapons offensively: could we quit this please? I'm really with Atrios on this. Just imagine how it would feel if the politics of other nations included the prominent discussion of whether or not to nuke us.

I was 14 when the Berlin Wall fell. People even a couple of years younger than me probably don't have much of a memory of growing up under a nuclear threat. I remember being really, tear-inducingly afraid sometimes as a child that the Russians were going to nuke us. I'm sure a lot of Eastern bloc kids were just as afraid of us.

And now we're threatening anyone and everyone in the world in the most inane, casual, off-handed, and self-evident way imaginable. Frankly, it makes me feel ashamed.