Fearing the Football
If Donald Trump’s administration worries you at all, it probably worries you for a very long list of reasons. The past two weeks have been an incredible deluge of bad news. For me, it’s very hard to decide where to spend outrage most effectively and sustainably. All of the advice I’ve gotten has said to choose one or two issues on which to focus.
It would be great if there were one or two issues where I was highly knowledgeable, well-suited to advocate, and maybe in a better position than others to be effective. I haven’t found issues like those.
Instead, today I’m choosing to start work on keeping Trump from starting a nuclear war. I am not especially knowledgeable about the issues involved, I’m not at all well-suited to advocate, and I’m in a terrible position to be effective. Beyond that, there are a ton of other reasons why this is a dumb issue to take on relative to others. (I’ll talk about that in my next post.) But, I think there should be citizen advocacy around this, and so far there hasn’t been much; it’s an under-served topic. Maybe I can help with that.
I’m a huge fan of the “learning in public” model I see Julia Evans and Kelly Sommers use on Twitter and on their blogs. (Julia writes about that a bit in this post.) I’m going to try something like that: intentionally unpolished blog posts, lots of questions on Twitter, trying to write down what I learn as I go, maybe a comic or two to make it easier for me and others to retain. Maybe this will be the only post or maybe I’ll stick with it for months or years, I’m not sure.
The first time I ever wrote to a politician was to then-President Jimmy Carter, soon after I learned about nuclear weapons, around age eight. I was outraged about the topic; the whole thing sounded incredibly stupid to me then. I still feel pretty much the same. Now I can understand the strategic arguments for them, but boy, those sure seem weak when the commander of that strategy is Donald Trump. Eight-year-old me would have a very strongly-worded letter for today’s me if I did and said nothing about this topic now.
Below are some resources for people interested in reading up or following others on the topic of Trump and nuclear weapons. I’ll use these to get started learning.
Richard Rhodes’ books have long been favorites for learning about the general topic of nuclear weapons, and I’m planning to re-read them all:
There’s an online, self-paced course, offered by Stanford and led by former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, that I’m planning to take:
Here are some articles I’ve read recently that have helped motivate my interest in working on this:
And finally, here are some Twitter accounts I’ve found helpful to follow on this topic:
If you have other resources to suggest, please let me know here or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcprecipice
