Linda Pentz Gunter -- The insanity of punishing the good

The insanity of punishing the good

  Posted on December 1, 2019 by beyondnuclearinternational

  

Why aren’t we exalting peace heroes and abolishing nuclear weapons?

By Linda Pentz Gunter

You’re liable to run into trouble if you try to suggest there is a greater threat to planetary survival than climate change. But there is. It’s called nuclear war.

Granted — and thank goodness — climate change is finally all the rage now. Rage has taken over, and rightly so, especially among the young whose future has been effectively ruined by the inaction of their elders.

There is no arguing that the climate crisis is an emergency. We have left it so late that the steps we must take have likely become unachievable — such as never extracting another drop of oil, another lump of coal, or another whiff of gas from the earth ever; starting now.

We are in a desperate scramble to save ourselves.

Photo by Friends of the Earth Scotland.

Meanwhile, the fact that we could set omnicide in motion with one deliberate or accidental push of the nuclear button is all but ignored. 

You could argue that presenting people with the prospect of global annihilation is so overwhelmingly horrible it just paralyzes them into inaction.

But why then, faced with a similar outcome, are people galvanized into action on the climate emergency? But not nuclear weapons?

This is not to say that we should be choosing one or the other. Both are existential threats, and whereas we used to argue that climate change was a lingering death versus nuclear war an instant one, that’s no longer true. The climate crisis is upon us. We are dying because of it right now.

However, to completely ignore a human-made threat that could annihilate virtually every living thing is extraordinarily ostrich-like behavior (albeit ostriches don’t really stick their heads in the sand, but the metaphor has, well, stuck.)