Equipped with up to ten warheads each, from 1985 through 2005 the Peacekeepers stood 71 feet high and weighed 195,000 pounds. With a reach of approximately 6,000 miles, the missiles served as a towering reminder to the Soviet Union that the United States was prepared for all-out nuclear war at any time.
I remember back when I thought we might actually get rid of war. Just demonstrate long enough, write enough articles, speak to enough audiences, on and on. That was back in 1985, when Reagan was about to install 50 Orwellian “peacekeeper” (MX) missiles under Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne Wyoming. Of course, my, and our little group’s righteous posturing — fired up by the 1980s Nuclear Freeze Movement — did no good. The missiles went in, and some credit their malevolent presence with contributing to the end of the Cold War.
Reagan was a Republican. Opponents to war, back then, were all Democrats. No wonder I was a Democrat.
I’ve been a peace activist all my life, but it was only during that feverish time — when I was running about the tri-state area that I called the Deep West (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho), feverishly speaking, and distributing Heartland, the magazine I c0-published, with another, equally foolish and determined woman, to local peace activist groups — that I “identified” as an (easily triggered) peace activist.
Check this out, my perspective a few years prior.
After two years of madcap “activism,” I began to recognize that not only was what I was doing not helping to defuse conflict, even between and within peace activist groups, much less world-wide, but in fact that my own unbridled fury had transmogrified me into a VIOLENT PEACE ACTIVIST.
With this sudden, stunning recognition I abruptly stopped what I was doing, retreated to my yurt in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and, for six whole months, tended to the fire in the tiny fireplace, its dancing flames evoking memory after memory of my own, seemingly lifelong, tendency to mental and emotional violence.
From then on, I recognized:
Peace begins within me.
I am the one I have been waiting for.
I began then, what turned into a seven year healing process. Which meant, for me, to uncover and begin to feel my way down into “Orphan Annie,” my own wounded child, whose father had left for the war when she was nine months old, and who, two years later, was deeply terrorized by radio announcements of our nation’s nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now, at 81, for fully half my life I have been consciously responsible for the condition of my Inner world.
As for the Outer World? What has changed in over 40 years? Not much. We are still here, at the gates of nuclear hell, despite all my and other nuclear doomers’ predictions. Geez, HOW?
Some kind of miracle, I’d call it. But what kind? Divine intervention? ET intervention? (See UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, by Robert Hastings).
I am no longer a Democrat. My former heroine, Killary, killed that.
It took me awhile to appreciate Trump. His personality turned me off. So bombastic, egocentric, narcissistic! In November 2016, I logged in a protest vote, for Jill Stein.
But then, over the next little while I began to recognize Trump was on board with all sorts of things that had long bothered me, especially the massive military industrial complex, and its bankster craving for endless WAR. Trump didn’t want war. In fact Trump never did start a new war, and instead, started to bring troops home. His Abraham Accords were a first step in attempting to defuse the ever-present threatened mideast maelstrom.
And what really struck me, was seeing how all the “swamp” (his word) creatures hated him. And how their MSM really was “fake news” (his phrase).
At first, his claims seemed so audacious, over the top. But were they?
Then, at the end of October 1917, Q came on board. Anyone, like me, with a tendency towards conspiratorial thinking (i.e., built to notice patterns, both surface and deep), was thereby instructed in Q’s claim that the corruption in the world ran much much deeper and vaster than I could ever hope to comprehend.
And there was Donald Trump, the one who aimed to expose it all.
Donald Trump: lightning rod.
How did he, hell, how does he, stand the heat of millions of eyes and voices and thoughts, all at once and always, from every conceivable direction, hating him, despising his very existence, desperate to get rid of him, no matter what it takes.
Well, it takes that kind of massive ego to be able to deflect the slings and arrows and bullets and bombs, and whatever other weapons our political, administrative, and so-called justice system have to wield. And it’s still going on. Nothing has changed, in the nearly four years that he seems to have been out of office. TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) still runs rampant, as I can attest simply by paying attention to friends and acquaintances in this decidedly left-leaning academic town where I live. Though I hear about people “converting,” having been not only “told” but successfully “shown” what We the People are up against, I have yet to see it locally.
So now, just yesterday, a supposed “lone wolf” attempted to asssasinate the Prime Minister of Slovakia. A man who had refused to go along with supplying Ukraine with more weapons for war. A man who had refused to sign on to the WHO document that, if passed, would put the entire world under its ‘health” regulations.
Here we go again.
WAR is still in charge.
So, now, and here’s the point of this post: on two occasions recently, I decided to “come out” to my local TDS friends, to their shock and dismay; when they were dissing him, assuming that of course I would too, I interrupted, saying that I am not against Trump, that in fact that I support him, because he alone among U.S. presidents, started no new wars abroad. How did they respond? Immediately, almost as if mindlessly repeating a slogan: “What about wars at home?”
They blame Trump for the contentious national environment.
And I guess it’s partly true. Had he not stepped in to say we need to drain the swamp, and in order to do so we have to expose all the swamp creatures, who will be writhing and kicking, desperate to stay alive, the roiling contention we are now drowning in might not be nearly as ferocious.
But I kept my promise to myself. I did not turn into a violent peace activist.
Instead, I just voiced my perspective, mildly.
Perhaps it functioned as a seed?
