Since we are on the subject of Dr. Sagan and right-wing fear
mongering, i wanted to share an excerpt from another chapter in
Billions and Billions. This is a speech that Sagan gave at the 125
anniversary re-dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. it apparently
is re-dedicated every 25 years. This is a several page read, but
well worth it. Most of you are younger than i am and did not grow up
during the cold war with its fear of nuclear war and regular civil
defense drills in elementary school. The horror that Dr. Sagan is
addressing, as we are see in
Jesus and John Wayne, is a direct
result of the militarism and fear mongering that the evangelical
right made into our culture. We can thank the evangelicals, at least
in part, for the horror described in this speech. Again, you are too
young to have lived through it on a daily basis, not that what we
live through now is any less horrid. I was wondering however, as
Sagan describes the nuclear arsenal, where are all these nukes now,
and in whose control?
the book chapter has the complete speech:
http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=422436
emphasis below is mine
"In 1945, at the close of World War II, the United States
and the Soviet Union were virtually invulnerable. The United
States bounded east and west by vast and impassable oceans, north
and south by weak and friendly neighbors-had the most effective
armed forces, and the most powerful economy on the planet. We had
nothing to fear. So we built nuclear weapons and their delivery
systems. We initiated and vigorously pumped up an arms race with
the Soviet Union. When we were done, all the citizens of the
United States had handed their lives over to the leaders of the
Soviet Union. Even today, post-Cold War, post-Soviet Union, if
Moscow decides we should die, twenty minutes later we're dead. In
nearly perfect symmetry, the Soviet Union had the largest standing
army in the world in 1945, and no significant military threats to
worry about. It joined the United States in the nuclear arms race
so that today every one in Russia has handed their lives over to
the leaders of the United States. If Washington decides they
should die, twenty minutes later they're dead. The lives of every
American and every Russian citizen are now in the hands of a
foreign power. I say we have made a fool's bargain. We - we
Americans, we Russians - have spent 43 years and vast national
treasure in making ourselves exquisitely vulnerable to instant
annihilation. We have done it in the name of patriotism and
"national security," so no one is supposed to question it."
Dr. Carl Sagan
THOUGHTS ON THE 125TH ANNIVERSARY OF
THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG
13-SEP-1988
it occurred to me that in more recent times, our school children are
still experiencing this horror - traumatized by a deadly threat from
current generations - active shooter drills and shelter in place
protocols. In this context, the threat is not missiles directed at
us, 20 minutes away, but rather our bat-shit crazy neighbor with the
arsenal in the back of his pickup truck, perhaps also 20 minutes
away, but no less a horror to those precious children in their
classrooms.
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson
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