Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

S
202 farther horizons
“make a killing” in the market, or wage futile “wars” on drugs,
poverty, and terrorism. Worse, our children are being schooled to
think violently by electronic games, television, and movies. We
have made no comparable effort to build institutions for the study
and propagation of peace and confl ict resolution or to cultivate
the daily habits of peace. We have barely begun to imagine the
possibility of a nonviolent economy in which no one is permitted
to profi t from war or violence in any form. And so it is surprising
that we are continually surprised when our collective obsession
with violence manifests yet again in violence down the street or
in some distant place.
The transformation to a nonviolent world will require courageous
champions at all levels—public offi cials, teachers, communicators,
philanthropists, artists, statespersons, philosophers,
and corporate executives. But in democratic societies it will most
likely be driven by ordinary people who realize that we are all at
the end of our tether and it is time to do something a great deal
smarter and more decent. And “somebody must begin it.” The
next step is to begin to rid ourselves of the most heinous weapons
in our bloated arsenals. But that requires, in the words of the
former commander of the U.S. nuclear forces, George Lee Butler,
understanding “the monstrous effects of [nuclear] weapons . . . and
the horrifi c prospect of a world seething with enmities, armed to
the teeth with nuclear weapons, and hostage to maniacal leaders
strongly disposed toward their use” (Butler, 1996). The course is
clear: we have “to rid ourselves of the attitudes, and the postures,
the policies, and the practices that we became so accustomed to
as routine” (Smith, 1997, p. 45). The goal is not to control nuclear
weapons, it is to rid ourselves of them.
At the end of our tether we must imagine the unimaginable:
a world rid of nuclear weapons and a world powered by sunlight,
safe from the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Utopia?
Hardly. But those are the only realistic options we have.