OW anti-nuke speech

[Black Irish]

Good Poe music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzzCpL_i7K8

Fellow children, there is not one of us who does not know that, out there, on the sunny side of the security blanket, this living world of ours has never known a single moment of such deadly jeopardy.

But our blanket is itself more dangerous then all the hawks in all the armies of the world, east and west. The blanket is more dangerous then the bomb. “What can I do?”, is what we murmur to ourselves, under that blanket. “What can one person do about all that?”

Complications? Translate them into choice and you’re down to just two choices: life or death. You hear that, Mr. Reagan?

But this is a bi-partisan celebration, and I come to praise him, not bury him. It’s true. I didn’t come to preach to the converted, but to speak a good word or two in season for the process of conversion.

Reagan’s campaign was fought and won against the most conservative president since Howard Taft, and Carter was just that. Reagan’s sunbelt friends and funders were from a richer, far-right mixture then the GOP was used to. So when the voices of the radical - yes, radical - right rose up in such sweetly perfect harmony, we discounted the votes cast, not for Reagan, but against a Baptist preacher whose chief defect was that he didn’t know how to preach.

Forget the numbers, which were not considerable, and hailed a landslide for the arch-conservatives, a mandate for the radical wing of the far-right. But like all radical constituencies, this one is rather small, and very loud. Once in office, no ordinary, able politician could afford to disregard it. Yet Ronald Reagan, all evidence to the contrary, is no ordinary man. No, what we have now in the White House is an authentic ideologue, the first one anyone can remember. His political ideas, which are fortunately not too numerous, would seem to be, like the elderly footprints of the movie stars paving the way to the old Hollywood theatre, embedded in concrete.

But wait! Wait and listen! Listen to the man three days ago in Germany. He spoke of peace marchers, and he did place a certain benevolent and almost pennant, but in the midst of all that, he did say that he had noticed something in one of those parades. It was a placard, and it read simply this: "I am afraid." The president, who is the very best of TV speakers, paused at this. But you know, I did feel there was something beyond his actor's skill that filled that pause. I heard for just that moment the rarest sound in politics: the resonance of human truth. For Reagan said, "I am afraid too." Isn't that just exactly what we want to hear from him?

Of course! Of course, that man will somehow learn that the slabbering snarl of the Soviets is the richtus of a mortal fear. Above all, he must finally realize that we are, all of us, afraid, and that all of his trillion dollar blustering about new armaments won't cure the nightmare; it will only make it worse.

Last week there was scarcely a sumptuous palace in all Europe that was not treated to the noisy rattling of the Reagan sabre. Diplomats have wondered why, a few short weeks before a scheduled conference on disarmament and peace, the peacemaker-in-chief should feel so frequently compelled to express himself in the language of the battlefield. At one point he swore to the Germans that the Marxist Russians shall be reduced to the ashes of history, and Fruedians will have noted that the word "ashes" was perhaps an interesting slip.

This is a question for which no man or woman has an answer, and it is simply this: in all our long history on this planet, there is nothing that a man has ever known...whether the world is young or old. Dear friends, just right at this moment I am afraid that I am feeling rather old.

They tell us - the scientists and the experts of all the arts of hell on Earth - that we are just now at a crucial crossroads in technology, that we are leaving the unthinkable and entering a new age of the utterly unspeakable. This news is partly what has shaken us awake. The truth is that we have, through those torpid years, begun to think of the unthinkable the way we think of death. A lot of us spend most of our lives forgetting that we're ever going to die, and brush away any intimations of mortality, because it's inevitable, and that notion of inevitability has somehow been allowed to tack itself on to the whole planet Earth.

Now we're reaching the eleventh hour, what is truly shaking a little sense into us, is the realization of what our true place was meant to be in this lovely, fragile habitation. We are the descendants of those artists who, thousands of years ago, made all those splendid paintings in the caves. They were our ancestors, and we too are ancestors.

For today, for as long as it is true, let us believe that it was more then rhetoric when Reagan told us that his heart was with the marchers. If only just marching would be enough to do the job. Well, just marching has brought him around to this. Just marching has made him agree to the formal terms of the Salt Treaty. He may be many things, but he will never be a cynic, and that's a lot to say for any man. Or any president. The say that men learn wisdom in that office. We here are ready to believe that you may soon discover that the voice of the rich, WASP country club is not uniquely, the voice of The United States of America.

Not only praise, but all our gratitude goes out today to a president who listened. But forgive us, Mr. President. There is one thing in which you are wrong, even today. You have mistaken "us" for "them". We are not "them".

He is a part of us.

[Black Irish]

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[Black Irish]

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