Nobody's Coming
As Reagan’s descent into sadness, illness and despair was becoming obvious, I was beginning school in a dusty, mouldy inner city hot box of a classroom in Paris, France. My memories of those days are pretty hazy, I couldn’t have been much older than seven. I was supposed to become a bilingual child, but the French is largely gone now.
One of my strongest childhood memories is of a summer’s day in this school, maybe two floors up a run-down building somewhere in the north of Paris. All four classes stood together in the biggest room, and we watched a speech by Ronald Reagan, with French subtitles capturing most of what was being said. I was supposed to read and not to listen, but my mind drifted. After a couple of minutes of Ronnie, we were shown the maps and the graphics. You can guess which maps and graphics I mean. With a pale green map and expanding yellow spheres. New York. Moscow. London. Berlin. Paris. Fallout spheres in half-shade followed. After the maps, a side-on animation of children in a classroom. In the animation, a bell goes off on the wall, and the children get underneath the desks on all fours. There’s a flash. Some of the children and desks vanish. Three others remain. They do a roll call for each other, the video explains. Call out your names from the front rows to the back.
After the video, we go into our classroom and are told we’re practicing what we see in the video. The bell goes off. We duck underneath the tables. The teacher explains, or so my weak French imagines, that some kids are being taken out into the hall because they get their turn next. I realise later that they’re the ones killed in the initial blast. It’s just me and three other kids. Two at the front call out their names. I’m at the back, with the other kid from England. We call out our names. Nothing happens. After a couple of minutes, I ask “what now?”. The kid next to me is a little older, and he explains:
That’s it. Nobody’s coming after this. He tries it in French: personne ne vient.
At least, that’s what I imagine he said.
The fear of the nuclear bomb was different for everybody then, and depending on where you grew up, you got more or less of it. In retrospect, it’s hard to say whether people worried too much or too little. But only idiots can look back and cynically surmise that anti-nuclear work and protest changed nothing. The bombs got built, and are still being built, but the number of plants and turbines are lower than what they would be. A few fewer toxic sites. One or two fewer Fukushimas, at the very least. One or two more peninsulas or islands we’re still able to see. The tide rolled back in a few places. Now, as powerful as they are, the pro-nuclear lobby still scurries around doing weird TED talks about how they’re the only solution for the challenges ahead.
Today, you can see a lot of right-wing commentary comparing the climate crisis to the hysteria about nuclear war throughout the 1960-1980s. That we overestimated the threat then and the culture of fear now follows the same pattern. This is the most pernicious lie of all the ones they’re using - far above blaming the Greens for land-clearing or the economic imperative for coal mining. This is the black beating heart. The lie that our fear is in and of itself, a lie. That reaction of any kind is an emotion. It has shifted very quickly from climate denial to disaster denial. You’re worrying too much. We’ve had this before. This pits conservative macho strength against the weakness and hysteria of, well, everything else.
Nobody’s coming. We wait for elections because we want what they’ve got; the triumphant delights of shock victories, a brief play in the halls of power before being ejected again. Our values and emotions on the big whiteboards. Perhaps we should be learning that the victories are only for them, they’re not part of the system we’re all wishing could be fair and free.
My pessimism peaked today as I choked leaving and entering work, tears streaming down my face as I reacted to eucalyptus ash gushing into town from hundreds of kilometres away. About everything; the climate, the future, the heat, politics, myself. Fear isn’t a lie, but it *does* lie to you in turn. Fear makes you forget how you started.
I have a very clear memory of a thought as I was underneath that desk, on all fours: if nobody’s coming, how will we know when the drill is over?
