Bomb Fears

Fears are hard to admit in part because there will always be a little voice in the back of your mind telling you that expressing your fears in words, communicating them to other people, will make them come true. So it’s with a certain amount of nervousness that I admit that ever since the sluggish, stubborn juggernauts America and Russia locked heads over the Ukraine, I have been scared out of my wits about nuclear war suddenly breaking out.

During the first few weeks, I found a tool on the internet which allowed me to calculate the impact of an atom bomb on my surroundings, Brussels, hometown of NATO headquarters. The results were projected on a map. I'd always carry this map in my head, always keeping in mind how far I’d have to paddle with my race bike to get out of the first two circles on the map, which demarcate the most lethal blast radiuses. I'd think of the Brussels landscape, try to picture the slopes, thinking of how I may position a natural barrier between me and the supposed impact point, cynically drawing practical lessons from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (less people died in the latter city because of its hills deflecting the blast).

Sometimes I would cycle back from the countryside to Brussels. At a certain point during the trip, I’d see the city exposed to me from an elevated point, and I would apprehensively eye the sky for that blinding flash of white light that would wipe out buildings, friends, memories in the basin lying before me. One time, while walking through a supermarket with Sweet Little Sixteen playing on my mp3-player, tears burst from my eyes as I realized that not existing would mean not being able to listen to Chuck Berry.

I pieced my argument for the inevitability of the catastrophe together from remnants of the history courses I followed at university, from Hollywood scenarios, from a simple sense of doom which has pursued me since childhood and moved me back then to look open-mouthed at passing Cessna private planes, waiting for that dark shadow that would detach itself from the plane, hurtle earthward and evaporate me and my prudent hopes of becoming an astronaut or a farmer.

I thought of the run-up to the First World War, of a greedy German Empire land-locked by a greedy British Empire unwilling to share imperial privileges. I thought of military men, who, simply because of the fact that they were sitting on top of huge armies, saw every solution to a problem in the barking of cannons. I saw politicians on both sides of the divide with teeth gritted, unwilling to give up the slightest morsel of the ground they had, in their minds, planted their flag on. It could only lead to war, I was convinced.

The actual act would come out of a fundamental sense of distrust. Confronted with a diplomatic buildup from the other side, with hostile military activity circling around its borders, one of the parties involved would get so convinced that the other side was planning a strike that they would consider a pre-emptive strike the only solution to save them from destruction. Governments, wanting to avoid panic, wouldn’t warn the public of the upcoming cataclysm. The bombs would start falling, spreading fiery death among unsuspecting civilians. Somewhere deep down in some bunker, some grizzled general would mutter ‘God, it’s gonna be hell up there’. Well, yeah, buttmunch, it’s gonna be.

Then, other images from the media would stick to my mind. Inhabitants of the Donbass region complaining of how ‘there’s just nothing to do here’, made me wonder, why they didn’t have jobs, why they were being left feeling disenfranchised and revolutionary, while their own oligarchs toy around with helicopters, yachts and soccer teams? I started connecting the whole summer of unrest to climate change, to a universal sense of bad times ahead and everyone trying to vouchsafe the piece of the cake that would remain after environmental disaster had struck. Why do people stubbornly insist on driving cars, why does the oil industry keep on trampling pristine natural treasures in a never-ending search for new black gold, I thought? Don’t they know they’ll also be wiped out when environmental decline finally sets people all over the world up against each other in grim battles to the death?

After a while, my panic attacks would often be followed up by spells of persistent rancorous feelings, raining through my head. It’s not fair, I’d think. Here I am, working at a Brussels inner-city school, trying to do my bit to bridge the gaps between cultures, using my bicycle for almost all my daily migrations (conveniently forgetting that I’d rent a car, through a citywide car rental system, as often as I could, just because I love to take a set of wheels for a nice spin), doing almost all my travels by train (conveniently forgetting that no longer than two years ago, I set myself a target of taking at least three plane trips a year, once taking a kerosene-guzzling flight for a mere two weeks’ Easter holiday in Australia), buying food with some sustainable label as often as I can afford (conveniently forgetting my frequent splurges on kebab meat and cheap hamburgers). Why, why are those other people, those immoral people, screwing up the world for me, I wailed in my head.

Cycling around town, I would suddenly be gripped by a powerful rage and fantasize about dragging motorists out of their cars, without really knowing very well where to take it from there. I felt like they were sucking the air from my living-space. That must be the way a pro-Russian rebel in the Donbass feels towards those satanical Nazi-lovers in Kiev. What environmental rights are for me, cultural rights are for him. However I twist and turn things in my mind, I find no way to blame him for the way he feels.

The cowardice and egoism of my thoughts of running and hiding from the apocalypse never really bothered me. I was too scared to actually notice I was only preoccupied with my own well-being. Ironically, the behavior that ensued from my fear of war was one that would, when shared by a great many in the world, actually further the risks of war. I was isolating myself, and my behaviour, especially towards politics, was becoming antagonistic. My anger was never going to convince anyone to stop driving a car, and my rage at the warmongers on both sides of the Atlantic was impotent if anything.

After the 2007 financial crisis, it puzzled a great many people that so little was done to curtail the powers of big banks, and the fatalism that ensued the failure of the Occupy movement and other expressions of social activism fuelled the rise of this new tide of nationalism. However, the reason of their failure may have also been the anger and indignation in their message. If you’re a rich person, and a couple of thousands of people are shouting abuse at you from across your garden wall, and demanding you hand over your cash, you won’t toss them your money. You’ll simply raise the wall. After all, how are you to discern whether the protesters’ anger is directed at you, or at your money-loving ways? Mental pictures of French Revolution guillotines or Communist firing squads must be an everyday thing for the wealthy. The merest indication of likewise public outrage only makes them tighten their grip on privilege, the only thing they’ve got to ensure their survival.

In a way, we are reaping what we’ve sown. Not that we’ve ever been particularly self-critical creatures, but popular culture during the last decade or so has abandoned all incentive for self-examination and soul-searching. Self-righteousness, fake subversiveness and paranoid self-pity, validated by the general public, set the tone. Yes, I’m talking about you, Miley Cyrus. And you, 50 Cent. Perhaps I’m becoming old-fashioned. Perhaps popular culture was always like that. After all, Elvis was a bird-brained luxury addict, however much I like Heartbreak Hotel. But the point remains that most of today’s popular culture and its icons set an example of validating one’s first impulses, however bellicose or paranoid they may be. A quest for self-knowledge and an understanding of the paranoia and aggression in our human nature is much harder to find in it. We would do well to reverse the trend.

The beginning of a new year is a time for resolutions. Mine, for this year, is to fight my anger. It doesn’t do me any good, it doesn’t do my surroundings any good. I will try to be more careful in the way I express myself, careful yet determined. I will discern between people and their worldviews, I will formulate my world-view in a positive way. I will try to be critical about the information I encounter, evaluating it instead of usurping it as a source of anxiety and anger. I will discuss good-naturedly, always recognizing my opponent in discussions as a fellow human being. I will see the solution of a problem not in the eradication of a class of people, but in the elimination of the problem.

And so I wish a merry 2015 to you, Dick Cheney, whatever shadow you’re lurking from now, hatching yet another plot grossly disregarding the well-being of the planet in favor of an arms-producer’s stock value. And I wish a merry 2015 to you, Vladimir Putin, whatever nuclear-armed submarine you’re christening right now, whatever upheaval you’re trying to stir up, grossly disregarding the well-being of the planet to safeguard the interests of the corrupt military-industrial complex you’ve set up that so well resembles the one of the country you see as Russia’s arch-enemy. I love you both just the way you are. And I will spend all of 2015 trying to practice and spread all those wussy values you both loathe and despise as impractical, and do my bit to try to turn the world into your worst solar-powered, mutual trust-based, pacifist nightmare. I hope you’ll like it.