FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY vs NUCLEAR WEAPONS
We began with a little deep breathing and the day’s mantra: I am a powerful being; I am a peaceful being. Not a bad way to begin a day. Or a discussion, for that matter. This particular discussion was initiated by one of my all-time favorite nonprofits, Ploughshares Fund. Check it out. When I get invited to anything Ploughshares I tend to accept.
The event was a Women’s Initiative Sunday Brunch with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Beatrice Fihn. Fihn is director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN,) which won the Nobel in 2017 for its work. That year 122 countries adopted the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. If you haven’t been following all this, to date 37 countries have ratified the treaty; once that number reaches 50 it becomes international law.
Notably absent from any such ratification list, of course, is the USA. And don’t hold your breath for Russia to sign. The U.S. and Russia together have about 90% of the current supply of nuclear weapons – say, 6,000+ or so each. It will only take a handful to blow up the planet.
It was against the background of the above that we started Sunday brunch with the powerful/ peaceful mantra.
Fihn was in conversation – via Zoom from her living room in Geneva – with Elizabeth Warner, Ploughshares’ Managing Director & Chief Development Officer. Asked how she got into the business of fighting for nuclear disarmament, Fihn said it was “kind of accidental. I was interested in justice, equality, human rights, women’s rights . . . And then I did an internship on nuclear weapons – and realized nuclear weapons are connected to all of these.”
The conversation quickly brought in Feminist Foreign Policy, an alternative to ‘male’ policies reliant on strength and threat – the “humiliate and dominate” approach to relationships personal and international alike that is currently popular. “I’m not one of those people who think women are more peaceful than men,” Fihn remarked. But the ‘softer’ approach – creating security for everyone through healthcare, education, gender equality etc – can be equally effective, she and Warner agreed.
About this treaty to ban nuclear weapons – which supporters, including this writer, believe will eventually gain the magic 50 ratifications and become law: Warner explained there is a three-step process required. First the government signs on, then necessary adjustments are made, then the treaty is ratified. To the obvious next question, “How much does it matter, really?” Fihn explained that “the idea behind (international law) is to create a new normal. We’ve done it with biological weapons and chemical weapons, and inspired the land mines treaty.” This writer well remembers an uncle who was gassed in World War I and never fully recovered; a world without chemical weapons brings solace. Imagining a world without nuclear weapons definitely brings peace.
After a crisis – climate disaster, pandemic, nuclear warfare – “Who cleans up the mess?” Fihn asked; and answered her own question: “Those people who make the least wages.” As this pandemic is making clear, she added, “those who really save us, in addition to the doctors and nurses, are the people who bring food and water,” and all the other service workers.
Warner pointed out that with other global threats – climate change, pandemics – the effect is felt, and then action is taken. But with nuclear weapons, once the effect is felt “it’s too late.”
Asked what gives her hope, Fihn said, “We’re at a point where women have more power, including women of color. More and more people are questioning the powerful. There are also growing calls for justice and anti-racism.” Plus, we’re only 14 countries away from having nuclear weapons be declared in violation of international law.
A final, hopeful note about the Sunday Brunch hosts: As of May 2020, the Ploughshares Fund Women’s Initiative had invested more than half a million dollars in 23 projects focused specifically on the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the nuclear field. Highlighting the interconnectedness of nuclear weapons, women’s rights and other social justice issues is a powerful way to speed us toward a nuclear-free planet.
Which is a peaceful thought.
This essay appeared first on Medium.com, a fine site for ideas and information that I’ve been writing for in recent months. You might want to check it out too.
I brought this on myself. Not by committing a crime, I hasten to point out, but by leaving the building, which is forbidden. Two months behind on a medical appointment, and confronted with signs of problems ahead, I broke out. And the policy of the geezer house where I live was thus: leave the building, return to 7-day isolation. Solitary confinement.
Day Four: The interesting thing about lethargy and unmoored-ness is that they are interspersed with moments of anxiety. It’s an unspecified anxiety, but then, that may be how anxieties work. As I am one whose moments of anxiety usually happen about once a decade, I can’t say. All I know is that solitary confinement comes with anxieties. In addition to having generally been anxiety-free most of my life, I have also always loved periods of solitude. The difference between chosen solitude and enforced solitude is equal to the difference between night and day. Chosen solitude = peace, beauty, tranquility. Enforced solitude = anxiety.
Early on, I worried about my fingernails. My fingernails, you see, tend to split perpendicularly, making the simplest tasks like folding socks or making beds a nightmare that leaves me with sometimes bloody fingertips. This affliction struck when I was in my 40s – which was a very long time ago. About 20 years ago (I’m in my 60s by then) my physician gave me her blessing to go get the fancy silk wrap manicure. I think she mainly wanted to get me off her back, having patients with somewhat more severe issues than splitting fingernails. Anyway, you can dig in the dirt with these fingernails. For the past 10+ years they have been gracefully administered by the lovely Little Yen at California Nails. Little Yen is so designated because there’s an older Yen at California Nails. Little Yen is a beautiful young woman whose eyes, when she smiles, which is frequently, crinkle into merry little upside down crescents with accent lines springing outward like fireworks. She has two beautiful children, Rachel and Randy, who are U.S, citizens as I hope Little Yen may soon be. And as a manicurist she is without peer. One springtime she painted little flowers on my nails, just for fun.
There is not a day that I don’t worry about how Little Yen is surviving; I can’t find her to ask, or to help. A silk wrap manicure by Little Yen will last for three weeks, maybe longer – at some point the dig-in-the-dirt layer will grow itself out and my ridggedy, problem nails will be on their own. I am somewhere past that point just now.
Something else has been more universally interrupted. When my late husband Bud turned 75 I threw him an OGTAB party, to which invitees were to bring a statement of One Good Thing About Bud written on a business card or similar note. Virtually nobody paid any attention to that size suggestion. I wound up with 8 by 10 framed declarations, posters, canvas paintings and one wind-up music box playing an original message. A lot of the OGTABs referred to martinis, but even more of them said Hugs. Bud was a 6’4” bear of a guy who never met anyone – especially a female anyone – whom he didn’t want to hug. Sometimes perfect strangers only newly introduced. Bud would make Joe Biden look like a cold fish. I don’t know about Biden-hug recipients (who are likely to be few and far between from here on out), but Bud-hug recipients simply knew they were huggable. Who doesn’t want to be huggable? This nation was built on hugs, for heaven’s sakes. Handshakes, at a minimum. When this is over may we please touch one another again?
There is a stillness here. Sometimes it’s eerily pleasant, the silence broken by birdsong in nearby trees. But often it is ominous. Having worked as a hospice volunteer and with other end-of-life organizations, I know the sudden stillness that is death, and others here have experienced it when losing a loved one. So here we are, in a place where most of us have come planning to stay until we die – and we’d just prefer not to be thinking about it in the middle of a pandemic. Listening to the stillness, watching the quiet streets no longer bustling with cars and people – manages to equate with death and become just a tiny bit stressful.
Some of us are more obsessive than others about checking the case/death numbers posted every morning at 9 by the San Francisco Department of 
About that “give the ventilator to someone else” line. I should say up front that this is not some lofty altruistic declaration. Ventilators are not a lot of fun, and many older patients (one physician friend suggested a scarily high percentage) wind up dead on them anyway. Even for just a few days, lying still with perhaps a hole in my windpipe and for sure a tube down my nose for nutrition approaches torture, in my considered opinion. Lying still would additionally involve being unable to write, communicate or do anything else that makes life meaningful. Thus, compromised with a dangerous virus and probably soon dying alone without loved ones of any sort nearby – no thanks. Shoot me with all the morphine on hand and let me go.
And in a growing number of states there is a right to confront mortality by hastening one’s dying. In California where I live there is the End of Life Option Act which gives terminally ill, mentally competent adults the right to ask their physician for life-ending medication. For many, that is a way to meet life’s end with extraordinary peace.
In-appt: /i’ napt – having or showing no patience with technology.
BART station and when the next train to El Cerrito will be departing. I love the Routesy people. Because I choose to believe that somewhere, somehow, there are real people who sit around programming my Routesy app to the most intimate degrees. I also occasionally use my Maps app. But the time it was telling me to turn left onto Laguna in 400 feet, and my Apple Watch buzzed my wrist when I got to Laguna – that was a bit much. I mean, who told my watch? I find this almost as spooky as the occasional Dick Tracy-type conversations I have with my wrist because I can’t reach my cellphone.
The Find-It App. It wouldn’t actually have to find stuff. It would just cause the designated item to beep until I got there. The item which has vanished: book, keys, wallet, checkbook – all those things I would like to find. I don’t need that Find-My-Phone thing; I’m sitting here holding the phone, for heaven’s sake, with all these superfluous apps staring at me.
Thus I could still check what’s going on – I balance my PBS/MSNBC intake with occasional Fox News programs in a generally vain attempt to understand my country and my fellow citizens – without putting my health at risk.