The Minutes...

Image Source: Giphy.com

Topics: Commentary, Existentialism, Nuclear Power, Politics

70 years...1947 to 2017.

Clearly in my fifth decade of life, I have vivid disturbing memories of the world post Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945:

"Duck and cover drills": the most asinine exercise to bend-over-and-kiss-your-ass-goodbye I recall with a certain level of disdain.

The Red Scare: Post the McCarthy era, ALL things Russian were bad. COINTELPRO used the scare as raison d'être to infiltrate Civil Rights organizations like the Black Panther Party of Self Defense, the Congress Of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.), the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (S.N.C.C.). We lived through The Cold War, the possibility of a conflict with Gog and Magog loomed in every ROTC and Sunday School class. Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth practically dripped with it.

M.A.D.: Mutual (or Mutually) Assured Destruction. When you've each reduced the planet to a crisp cinder, what victory does ANYONE left alive sanely claim?

The Doomsday Clock was meant to be figurative only. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have always used it to foster a continual public debate (when you debate, you cannot war) regarding the existentialism question Shakespeare through Hamlet posed:

To be, or not to be--that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--

No more--and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--

To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprise of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,

The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered.

Source: Monologue Archive: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

At least...it USED TO BE figurative, only.

The Bulletin: It is two and a half minutes to midnight
2017 Doomsday Clock Statement
Science and Security Board
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Editor, John Mecklin