Look at all those toys! Grandma Throop must have found some great deals downtown at Woolworths and the Boston Store. Dave is the younger brother in the photograph, and also my father—an aging toddler during wartime, but glad to know that even if his Dad didn’t come back from France in one piece, at least the robin would return to build her nest in the springtime.
A nuclear free world! For the next 8 months anyway. Though on Christmas Day, 1944, barring a big asteroid impact or an untimely earth plunge into the sun, most life would carry on even if wet markets, Hitler, and industrial pollution put humankind on a path to a point of no return.
Just a few miles away, at 926 Rutgers Street in East Utica, four month old Keitha, Dave’s future wife, wasn’t interested in toys or boys yet. But her time would come. She married Dave 18 years later and gave birth to my sister and me assuming, wrongly, that life would go on after all that ducking and covering practice in high school. She did her part. Got down on all fours under the desk, waited for the bell to ring, walked to her locker, and then to the parking lot where her steady waited with his idling v-block and duck’s ass all greasy gobbed.
Vroom, vroom. Off they went to the future, the first generation of the nuclear age.
And here I am on Black Friday, a second generation nuke kid, to show you how to shop for sanity in a departmental society. There are some great deals on the future in aisle five. Just .003% chosen to be taken off the human race will insure the continuation of life on earth for another billion years or more. That’s a lot of red wagons under the tree! Our store is full of choice ideas to eliminate the threat of physics and killers. Books to read, thoughts to think, dreams to see, and guilty people to terrorize! Holly wreaths, smiling children, and yes, Santa Claus—who don’t look at all like Harry Truman, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump—the agonized prostate killers of Christmases’ past, present, and future. Our department store Santa is the bright sun on a cold December morning, promising to come back again for the next 5 billion yule logs. Santa does justice to the death-wielders—the four star generals and CEOs of Nuclear, Inc. A Santa of increased superstition, with just enough science to protect us from disease and stupidities like nuclear technology. He’ll fly the contemporary Oppenheimers back to the North Pole and drown them under the sea ice. He says either nip annihilation in the bud or suffer these sandwich eaters while they break our lives down into radioactive dust.
It will be done. It must be done. I shall not be crazy for you if you cannot go sane for me, like an owl or a bedbug protects her own, sanely. And you know exactly what I mean. No other species would invite caroling doom in for hot cocoa and cookies on a cold, Black Friday night. Not after songs like, “Press This Button O Lord and Melt Our Babies!”, or “Jingle Bells, Corpses Smell”. So why on any day of the year do we give Boeing, Inc. a free pass to build and distribute a magic reindeer with sleigh to visit death upon every child’s home in a single night? How do we continue this ceaseless shopping for trinkets like my dear mother, the 1950s teenager, who thought ducking and covering would just make it all go away?
White Monday and Red Thursday happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, 1945. Their Black Friday decorated another kind of super deal showroom, and the only present left under the tree that Christmas, was the very big surprise of any tree to be seen and/or a single toddler left to make happy another day.
Why the persistence of this threat 80 years after little David got bored of his presents under the tree? What the hell is wrong with our psychology? Did shock and fear flip the switch in the genes of the children huddling under their desks in 1958 while the teachers in the school declared insanity the new normal? Are present day adults just genetic mutations that were inevitable from a species of parents and grandparents who wanted to kill themselves? How can our evolution expect to proceed another millennium and beyond while we continue to ignore the violent trespass upon our families? Honestly, is our community merely a host of fearful lickspittles who will not confront the monsters that profit off the promise of Armageddon? What prevents the chef or waiter from cold cocking the Lockheed Martin CEO off his “power lunch” chair? For heaven’s sake, man, he’s negotiating annihilation of earth’s species! Do you get it? Do you understand?
[Please imagine me taking hold of your shoulders and shaking you.]
This Black Friday I hope to knock insanity out of our heads. I dream to shock you back into thinking like a dues paying member of a sane society. There are living people lording over us an 80 year old weapon’s technology. They are not stone, or supernatural, and certainly not inevitable and forever. They are mortal men and some women who are the lowest rank of animal that human being can descend to. They make a Hitler planning of a Final Solution look like child’s play beside a tree on Christmas morning. The U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons went into effect in January 2021. At present, 122 nations have signed the treaty, 74 have ratified it. I intend to join them as a nation of me. You want in on a world free of nuclear annihilation? Or do you prefer to be my enemy? It doesn’t matter. Either way, disapproval is expected. But rest assured, I’ll do what I can to save your kids a future while you live and let live these brazen killers.
Happy Black Friday!
PhD Candidate Orf Considers Feelings of a Little Mertlin 2023. Acrylic on loose canvas, 18 x 24"