Joy of joys! We can still sleep safely in our British beds. Tony and Gordon, our ex-Socialist, soon to be ex-leaders, want to renew UK's nuclear missile program - while ganging up on Iran, and anybody else who dares look beyond fossil fuels.
Now, not a lot of people know this, but my middle name is
Radioactive, added when my misguided parents thought that church was good for me. I had been in the church choir for years, happy enough in my permanently disconsolate way, even though I was forced to wear archaic costumes and sing bizarre songs to a God I didn't subscribe to; but even at age eleven, I knew that the world was fucked, whether or not my mortal soul existed.
I had read that since the first nuclear attacks on Japan at the end of WW2, and the subsequent destruction of the South Pacific and various parts of the USSR in the name of self-protection, background levels of radiation had risen 500% compared to pre-nuclear levels. That was in the 1970s - God knows what it is now. I was already a committed unilateralist - why spend a huge proportion of your national income on weapons that could never be used - and as for M.A.D. - mutually assured destruction - there never was a better acronym. I knew that there were no less than nineteen nuclear missiles aimed at Croydon from the other side of the Iron Curtain, day and night, and the fact woke me up with nightmares on fairly regular basis. You could say I was a sensitive child. Or, you could say, I was a surprisingly sane and well-informed human being, living in a society which spent the entire time in massive collective denial.
So, like any conscientious person, I campaigned. I was (still am) a pacifist, and I made sure that I had all the arguments to present to the mad people who surrounded me. This safety is an illusion, I patiently explained, set up by the scientific-military establishment, which will rob us of our birthright, a healthy, functioning environment. War itself can never produce a lasting victory, and this war will lay waste to the planet, destroying not just human habitat but all of life with it.
I didn't lecture, I was calm, I persisted, but of course, people had not the ears to listen, nor the minds to cope with thinking the unthinkable. My voice had not yet broken, yet I was in command of the facts, knew the arguments, and adults would attempt to escape the inexorable logic by belittling me with ridicule. I rarely rose to the bait.
At St Margaret's Church, Upper Norwood, the time came when we should, in the manner of true believers, be confirmed. This Anglican version of confirmation was entirely without the fuss and ritual of the Catholic version.
They somehow had kept the pomp of a true and valuable rite of passage, like the Bar Mitzvah. We had a watered-down, apologetic, academic affair, dry, stripped of anything scary or spiritual. We were supposed to attend a few "classes" in the Vicarage in preparation for ther great day.
Two years younger than I, my sister attended with me, in a small group of six or seven children. Children who actually wanted this accolade were such rarities in our district at that time, that we were being processed in an untidy group spanning quite a few years. It hadn't actually happened in our small church for some years. Towards the end of the interminably boring evening sessions, it was revealed that tradition was that we could add a new name, should we desire. Sister of course desired, her eyes big with expectation, young enough for her to consider it meaningful. She decided, lovingly, to add a fourth monicker to her existing three names: she would add "Angela", after our mother. It was Christian enough, and she was thrilled to bits with this chance for self-determination.
I was cynical. I thought it was a nonsense, all of it, and had I then had the rebelliousness which puberty was about to equip me, I would not have been there in the first place. I thought about it, though - sis was right, this was a nice opportunity.
The following week was the final grooming session before the big day. The weekend after that, John, Bishop of Croydon, was coming to the church to press-gang us all into God's Holy Army. So, we trotted out our learning to show that we all knew the desperate import of our predicament, the meaning of sin, and that Jesus was our saviour.
Yeah yeah yeah, I was intoning internally, Buddhist-style - it helped me stay calm as they all fell to their knees in supplication.
At the end of the session, we were all asked whether we wanted to add a new name. Some children didn't, some of them trotted out their considered choices: "Andrew" "Timothy" "Peter" - good Biblical names, met with a warm smile from the Vicar. "Wayne" made the Vicar's usually stolid complexion flicker just for a moment -
why on earth, you could see him thinking,
you've escaped the name once! Still, no objection on the basis of no Saint Wayne - good. Next - sister - she beamed up at him, sure of herself. "Angela!" she pronounced, ready to cite chapter and verse if needs be to support her choice. The Vicar's warmth reestabished itself. "That is your mother's name, isn't it," he said approvingly. I looked coolly at her - she looked like she was going to burst.
I was last in line, oldest, and although I was the best singer in the choir, I was also known to be less than instinctively compliant, so the Vicar paused, and instead of asking me directly, just looked at me and raised his eyebrown in an inclusive, adult way.
Nice, I thought,
bit of us and them..."Radioactive," I said, looking directly back at him. He searched my face, hardening almost imperceptably. After a short few seconds, in which the group of children gazed incomprehendingly in my direction, he replied, "I see," and turned away.
Mildly disappointed that he hadn't questioned it there and then, and given me the soapbox I wanted, I comforted myself with the thought that at least he hadn't said no, and five minutes later, we exited into the dark night air.
The Vicar was wise enough to avoid a confrontation with a stroppy youngster at the end of a busy day, but of course, he wasn't a Vicar without having a command of the fine art of exerting moral pressure. Within a few days, I was summoned by the parents to answer for my crime, and so I explained to them the reasons for my choice. An hour and half later, I was still referring to CND literature and explaining the terrible ecological consequences of the arms race, and so they abandoned their mission, deciding that I probably didn't have the guts to go through with it, and that, come Saturday, I would comply with tradition.
Families are sometimes wrecked upon the rocks of parents' underestimation of their children's determination. My autonomy was more sacred than any watered-down, empty ritual; my choice more truly spiritual, in the manner of the non-conformist traditions of my grandparents, than the route that I was expected to take. So, dressed up in ill-fitting Sunday best, in a line of good, clean, smart kids, I was duly processed by the Bishop - a nice, grey-haired man, whose tolerance of human quirks extended beyond that of his flock - and confirmed in the Church of England, with prayer, with due solemnity, as my parents bravely tried to pretend that they hadn't just heard the word "Radioactive" officially added as their third son's new name.
They expected me to drop Radioactive, even after that precious moment, but I added it to my signature, wrote it inside my school text books, and within weeks of my turning eighteen, it was officially added by deed poll for the princely sum of fifty pence. It's on my passport. It is my name.
And so, I am Radioactive; all of us however are radioactive, and none of us have a choice in that - we do however have a choice as to what degree our delicate bodies simmer and fry via random genetic mutation. NO amount of radioactivity from the nuclear process is safe - that goes for missiles, power, the lot. Even small doses which can cure some ills are very, very dangerous. There is no safe place for it on the planet, no hole deep enough, no container strong enough. The huge amount of nuclear pollution we have already produced will outlast all current civilisations - it will be our lasting legacy, like the Egyptian pyramids, like the Mayan temples.
The choice we have is whether, after all the advances which the unsung hero Gorbachev almost single-handedly brought about by effectively ending the Cold War arms race, through our complacency and endless failure to make permanent peace among nations and tribes, through the arrogance of developed nations attempting to maintain their exclusivity, we allow the spiral of nuclear destruction to be danced all over again, to it's inevitable, catastrophic end.
nuclear Trident missile radioactive confirmation catastrophe
Even from the middle east, I felt the disturbance in the funk force.
Still, the "safe" dose level of practically every drug is frequently revised and almost always downwards.
So, new condoms were manufactured to the size of the Golden Mean, resistance was overcome, and thus Thailand became the only country in the South Asia to slow infection rates where they fell steadily during the nineties, with 100% use among prostitutes and free distribution by the government. Mechai himself gave condoms out in his Cabbages and Condoms restaurants instead of after-dinner mints; which goes to demonstrate that Western remedies are often not instantly translatable to other cultures, and that when pride is booted out and people really focus on a problem and understand the underlying mechanisms, they can often fix it.
