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"What's the matter with you," Jennie approached him gently.
"I'm mad. I'm boiling mad, because I hadn't done all that I could. Sure I had been involved in peace groups. We were screaming our heads off while the world sat idle and watched itself build more and more bombs...." He planted his face in his hands, moaned, then got out of his seat and left the flight deck.
"He had family in Seattle," explained Orlando.
Half an hour later Jack returned and apologized.
I told him that no apology was needed, that we understood what he must be going through.
"No, no, you don't understand," Jack replied. "You can't possibly understand what it means to have your parents...." He stopped in mid-sentence.
"We campaigned against this madness," he said a wile later. "My father was a minister in Seattle. But had we done enough? Who listened to us? The city was profiting too much from the cruise missile business. It was sacrilegious to speak out against it. But my father did. We both did. Except we didn't really speak. We whispered! We organized peace marches. Once we had 200,000 in attendance. But all what this was good for, was a front-page story and a two minute coverage on the evening news. We even pressured the church to support a nation-wide 'Freeze' referendum, which won by popular support by a wide margin. Maybe that's a miracle for a city that profits from bombs. But it wasn't enough. The people's wishes were considered none-binding on national security matters. Maybe we should have made them binding. This is a democratic country in which each individual counts. Is it not? That was a delusion. Now my parents are dead, and I blame myself for not doing enough for peace!"
"Or not the right thing," added Jennie, gently, "but who knows what the right thing is?"
Her reply seemed to help him.
There was a deep silence after Jack stopped talking. I remembered Harry. I remembered seeing his family. I remembered Seattle as it was, and than those giant pillars of fire. I could still remember my own agony, before I found some faint reason to hope again. Jack had no such reasons for hope. As a diversion to keep my mind occupied, I scanned the instrumentation panel: airspeed, fuel, temperature, pressures. Everything looked normal. I looked out through the window. The stars seemed especially bright this morning.
A while later, Jack began to talk again. "I wonder how democratic our government really is if the people's voice can be so blatantly ignored. We had a man running for President. He was second in popular support. He advocated economic development rather than military imperialization. The refused to even speak his name, much less put it on the ballot, and were he did get on he was denied the delegates that the people had voted for. In America democracy died before the country died, and we all stood aside and let it happen."
"You shouldn't blame out government for what the Russians have done," countered Orlando.
"No, it was our fault!" Jack blasted him. "I blame us, all of us, for what WE haven't done. It's our life, our country, our future, and our responsibility to guard them. It was our stupidity, not the Russian's madness, or a human failure under pressure, or whatever else caused this in a technical sense. We should have known that this would happen, and we did know! We made movies about it, wrote books about, preached sermons about it. What we are facing now did not happen unforeseen. It was assured to happen. In theory, nuclear deterrence is fine. In theory anything is possible. In real terms the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction is not a deterrence, it is an assurance that it will happen."
He turned to me. "Were you ever successful in balancing two steel balls, one on top of the other? The feat is theoretically possible. The physical principle exists that allows this to happen. But did you ever meet a man who can do it? Of course not! It simply can't be done in practice. It's a damn miracle that no one can pull off. It is an endeavor in which failure is assured. We should have gift-wrapped our whole damn missile force as a present to the Russian people for the anniversary of their revolution! We should have invited their film crews to witness the destruction of the launching facilities. Then, with our hands more empty of bombs, we might have built a road towards peace and Seattle would still be alive today, including my parents..." Here, Jack broke down again and cried.
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