one life
We don’t want you to swim in the river Kathy Kelly on the effects of our latest weapons of despair
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ast month, the US Navy unveiled its Mach 7 Magnetic Mangler, “a railgun straight out of Star Trek that can take out targets at 100 miles with a projectile flying at nearly 7,000 feet per second.” So far, the US military has spent $240 million developing the railgun over a period of ten years. CBS News reports that the railgun won’t go to sea until 2016, but one article suggests that the US military may have decided to show off the Magnetic Mangler in order to send a message to the Russian government. While the American public gets to see the weapon, so do America’s enemies. The military in recent years has timed the unveiling of new technology to global events. The last time North Korea got frisky, the Navy showed off an anti-missile laser. Now, with the crisis continuing in the Ukraine, the Navy is showing off something even scarier. In advance of the University of Wisconsin’s recent “Resources for Peace” conference, a professor friend asked participants to consider whether the increasing competition for depleted global resources, for goods to meet essential human needs, would tend inevitably to make people less humane. She was thinking particularly about what she termed “the shrinking humanism” seen in dystopian novels and films that portray cruelty and violence among people who fear for
their survival. I posed her question to Buddy Bell, one of my young friends here at Voices for Creative Non-Violence, who has traveled to several war zones and has worked steadily among people suffering displacement and poverty in the United States. “Well,” he said, after a long pause, “there are precedents for dramatic and selfless service on behalf of sustaining a community, even in a time of desperation and war.” Then he went to his room and got me a CD. “Listen to the story Utah Phillips tells on Track 3,” he said.
He told his son about a day when he was longing to take a swim in the Imjin River. His clothes and boots were rotting, and he had mold growing on his body
Taking a swim Utah Phillips, a folk singer and storyteller, had been a US soldier in Korea. His son asked if he had ever shot anyone. He said he didn’t know, but that whether or not he shot anyone wasn’t the story. He told his son about a day when he was longing to take a swim in the Imjin River. His clothes and boots were rotting, and he had mold growing on his body. Chinese soldiers on the other side were having a wonderful time swimming. Why, then, were the local Koreans insisting he must not swim in the river? “A young Korean told me, ‘You know, when we get married here, the young married couple moves in with the elders, they move in with the grandparents, but there’s nothing growing! Everything’s been destroyed, there’s April 2014 | ColdType 41