and pleased; my skepticism can’t deny this mood of solidarity. A deputy snips our handcuffs with a pair of shears. When the next load of detainees walks through the door, I cheer too. The room buzzes with the energy of five hundred people. We stand around listening to impromptu speeches. As deputies and officials from the District Attorney’s office stride in and out, we gripe. Open the windows! Give us some air! The D.A. walks in, a heavy-set, scowling man in a leather jacket. Somebody yells: When ya gonna start arraignments? Whenever we feel like it, he barks back. Mutters of resentment bubble up. The D.A. announces that there are too many of us in the room; a hundred must return to the buses before he will start legal processing. We won’t go, we shout back. Alright, says the D.A., sit here as W HAT WOULD I DO IF I KNEW THE BOMBS WOULD FALL NEXT MONTH? STAY DRUNK? R lOT? PRAY? RUN ? NONE OF US BELIEVES THE HOLOCAUST IS IMMINENT. WE CAN'T CONNECT THE CRYPTO-SCIENTIFIC GIBBERISH IN THE NEWS WITH DISMAL DEATH IN THE FIRESTORMS. long as you please, but nothing happens until some of you leave. A demonstrator joins the D.A. on the podium. He tries to calm the crowd, to get us to accommodate authority. Suddenly my companion jumps up, enraged. Don’t let them separate us, he shouts. Stick together! Others join in. I feel the anger feeding on itself. You bastards are the enemy! You help them rehearse the death of the world, and goddammit, we won’t go along anymore! The demonstrator on the podium raises his arms over his head and waits. He looks absurd, like he wants to surrender, but all around the room people follow his example. The hostile voices subside. The sheriff explains the practical concerns behind the removal-to-the- buses issue: fire, panic, sanitary facilities. A deal is finally struck: If we sit down , spread ourselves out and don’t crowd to the front, the D.A. will process people ten at a time. My friend is disgusted. He’s sick of the assumption that we are peaceful, loving people who will do what we’ re told. These jerks are planning to kill me and my kids, he says. Why should I play the nice guy? Forget this pseudo-Gandhian farce! Fine, I think, but the Juggernaut’s minions are right. We are harmless folk marching around in the desert talking to ourselves, and they know it. Besides, these sheriffs don’t build bombs or make foreign policy; they just work here. The District Attorney steps down into the crowd. In spite of whatever personal feelings they may have about nuclear weapons, he says, he and his helpers are simply doing their jobs. You could refuse, a demonstrator points out, challenging him politely. Yes, but we took an oath To Uphold The Law, the D.A. replies. There’s a smug speciousness to the District Attorney’s line of reasoning. It reminds me of good Germans watching smoke. But, undeniably, he has a point. So do the hypocritical “ arms control” negotiators, enjoying the good life for decades in Geneva. So do the self-serving warhead engineers, solving their “ technically sweet” problems in their well- funded labs. They’ re all just “ doing their jobs.” My father, also, “ did his job.” Is that what’s bothering me? My father’s been dead for twenty years. I never asked him why he spent twenty-five years of his life serving the nuclear weapon’s industry. Could I have asked such an ungrateful question? Should he have asked it himself? He was pushing sixty when he died. The nuclear age and me, one of its anxious children, have passed forty already. Time flies. My father didn’t see what the Juggernaut would eventually bring him. I do. That's why I ’m here: unfinished business. The economic and political tendrils of the nuclear weapons culture are so well established that at first glance it seems impossible to cut them away. It’s like a systemic illness that’s metastasized throughout the body politic: We know it’ ll kill us someday, but taking the cure may kill us now. Who’s going to risk it, particularly since the disease isn’t painful yet? How many will abandon power and position for the sake of an abstract possibility? Would I? Would you? I’m suddenly repelled by the banality of all this. What would I do if I knew the bombs would fall next month? Stay drunk? Riot? Pray? Run? None of us believes the holocaust is imminent. We can’t connect the crypto-scientific gibberish in the news with dismal death in the firestorms. What could make the horrors of this phantasm real? New Delhi vaporizing Karachi as we watch on TV? A meltdown in California? An ICBM exploding in its silo? How can we make the Juggernaut reveal its hideous face? What do I want here? “ Peace?” “ No nukes?” I know it’s impossible to get rid of the things. The weapons themselves, as well as the knowledge of how to build them, will be part of humanity’s furniture for however long we last. If “ peace” is merely the absence of war, the Juggernaut can always claim to preserve “ peace” by preparing for war. For forty years, politicians have credited nuclear weapons with postponing war. And if the' bombs do finally drop, the “ breakdown of deterrence" will be blamed, if there’s any time left for blame. This is the old way of thinking, in spades. For many of the people in this room, on the other hand, “ peace” means a “ New Age” in which war become irrelevant and c o n f l ic ts d is a p p e a r as o y r c o n sciousness evolves. The “ New Age” response to the Juggernaut is not political but “ spiritual.” I think about the bumper stickers exhorting us to visualize world peace. All around me, people are saying that the resolution of our little conflict with the D.A. is evidence of the new consciousness at work. But wait. The cops lose nothing by accommodating us; it’s convenient for them to do so. If it were more expedient to use v io lence , they would. Nothing has changed, I mutter. Nothing has changed on Yucca Flat, where my father worked, where they’re busily preparing the next shot as we sign our misdemeanor citations. Nothing has changed in the boardrooms of the powers-that-be. Nothing has changed in the bomb factories. Yet something has changed here. Something has changed in me, and in the others in this room. We are five hundred people. The energy we release, the solidarity we create by our presence here, is real. Our sense of not being alone, of sharing a commitment, is real. It’s not enough yet, but it’s real. When we are five thousand, fifty thousand, our energy may become high enough to overcome the tremendous inertia represented by the cu ltu re of nuc lea r weapons, this Juggernaut of our darkest nightmares. I can glimpse more clearly the magnitude of change that Einstein saw. The truly daunting reality is that we have to fo rce th a t change ou rse lves . No chimerical “ New Age” or longed-for “ well-intentioned Adm in istra tion” is going to do it for us. Perhaps Einstein meant that each of us must take individual responsibility for our collective fate, a role reserved up to now for saints and madmen. We must steel ourselves to act, in spite of our doubts and reluctance. A willingness to struggle is all we’ve got, but as the history of human evolution has shown again and again, that willingness can be more powerful than anything else. My friend and I emerge from the Beatty Community Center in time to see the setting sun turn the desert hills a transient orange. As we walk toward the bus which will take us back to Las Vegas, somebody hands us a button: I Was Arrested for Peace. Writer/playwright Joe Sackett lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is his first story- in CSQ. Artist Carl Chaplin lives in Vancouver B.C. where he’s currently working as Dr. Art Nuko. He painted this issue’s cover image. Stories by and about him follow. Above: Dr. Art Nuko grabs the hot line Below: Chaplin at a cabin on the Skeena River 36 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
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