Scared.

When I was a boy--just about 22 or 23--the world was a scary place. Like today, we had a madman in the white house, ronald reagan, who had surrounded himself with people who believed the united states could win a nuclear war with the soviet union.

Thomas K. Jones was reagan's deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. In 1982 he said in an interview with Robert Scheer of the LA Times (before it became a kids' newspaper) “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. …  It’s the dirt that does it. … If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”

No one was really going to make it.

In a nuclear "exchange" as John Hersey wrote about Hiroshima, "The living will envy the dead." Easily 50,000,000 people would die. Probably more.

Yet, the saber-rattling and brinksmanship continued.

When people joke about tens of millions being annihilated, whether they're "good guys" or "bad guys," we're all bad guys.

One morning, back probably in 1982, I went down to the subway at 110th and Broadway at about 6AM in order to get to my office around 6:30AM. That was my start time when I was young and trying to write something more consequential than an ad or a blog.

When I walked down to the platform, it was covered with grey chalk outlines of bodies. I thought they were the night-before's murder victims (New York was rougher in those days.) No, they were painted by an anti-nuclear group as a warning about the vaporized bodies we would see everywhere if reagan's thinking prevailed.

The soviets had 10,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the united states. The united states had 10,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the soviet union. 

1,000,000 New Yorkers protested all this in Central Park on a summer day in 1982. It was said to be the largest protest in amerikan history.

I was scared then.

I'm more scared today.

Scared that amerika kills its own citizens. Scared that amerika lies about it. Scared that amerika attacks sovereign nations. Scared that amerika attacks the press, the poor, the people.

Scared of cops wearing face masks.
And killing innocents.
With impunity.

Scared of systematized, not random, terror. 
Scared of state terror.
Sanctioned terror.
Terror employed expressly to scare us.

I'm scared.

Angry.

Scared that my taxes--which I can't not pay--are supporting all this.

I'm more scared than I have ever been.

No one, no matter how 'law abiding' is safe.

We're supposed to be afraid.

Afraid so we don't think straight.

So we jettison our morality, 
our humanity,
our decency,
our equipoise.

That's the point.