This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for my family and friends, the semester I four-pointed, my dog Maddie and the fact that we haven’t yet blown ourselves up.
It’s an incongruous list, perhaps, but this weekend, as I anticipated the coming family drama while listening to premature Christmas music, the announcement of an Iranian disarmament deal put nuclear annihilation on my mind.
Visions of sugarplums danced alongside visions of mushroom clouds, and I thought about the strange beauty of the tale of nuclear weapons. Who could predict that we’d invent the bomb and set it off, and its use would usher in the greatest era of peace the world has ever seen, particularly in the countries that acquired it? If it weren’t real, it could be a parable: In order to convince ourselves that we should not destroy each other, we first had to prove to ourselves that we were capable of doing so.
Shadows burned into sidewalks. That’s the image it took for us to seriously consider another way to deal with international conflict.
This is my last column of the year, so I figured I’d go back before writing it and look through my old ones. While doing so, I came across the first column I wrote this year, which was about tragedy as a motivator in the wake of the Newtown shooting.
I observed back in January that we seem to need tragedies of increasing magnitude in order to spur action to fix festering societal problems. The omnipresence of distractions and information leads to a situation in which tragedies seem more frequent and then are more easily forgotten. Thus, tragedies quickly lose their potency—and this potency is a necessary ingredient for fixing problems when the fixes involve difficult sacrifices.
We used to react well to tragedy. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in 1945 ushered in the most peaceful era the world has ever seen. A picture of the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s led to a successful banning of chemicals that cause ozone depletion. While the cost of implementing the changes was high, some have predicted that the ozone layer will be entirely restored in a few decades. Pictures of the carnage from gun massacres in Dunblane, Scotland and Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996 led to severe increases in gun control in the U.K. and Australia. While they were hotly debated at the time, the policies are now celebrated. Photos of Hoovervilles and soup kitchen lines spreading down city blocks during the Great Depression led to the Glass-Steagall Act, which outlined stringent regulations that forced a complete reworking of the banking system, but eventually kept our financial system stable for half a century.
This isn’t the case anymore.
This year, as in many of the last, we read news about more extreme weather events. We read about the typhoon in the Philippines and unprecedented heat waves across Europe. Yet despite mounting evidence partially attributing an increase in extreme weather events to climate change, talks in Warsaw this week are expected to result in little agreement. This year, the economy continued to recover from the crisis that has defined our generation, yet we’re recovering with the same problems, perhaps even exacerbated: The increase in regulation following the financial crisis has been weak. While the stock market reached its highest ever levels, the recent senate proposals to increase the minimum wage will most likely die on sight in the House. And after I wrote the column about my hope for Newtown’s ability to spur action on gun control in January, the legislation it inspired was voted down in April. Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt, and we don’t even talk about this difficult reality anymore. The healthcare system is broken, and efforts to fix it have been endlessly criticized without any feasible counterproposal.
In fact, Congress’s overall productivity is at an all-time low. The 112th Congress was the least productive congress on record, and the 113th is on track to be worse—by far. Almost comically, this has been a year of Congress attempting to manufacture tragedies to force themselves to act: the fiscal cliff, the government shutdown, the debt ceiling. Repeatedly, these incidents have failed to inspire their intended action.
But we’re not blowing ourselves up. Iran is on its way to disarmament—and that’s the single piece of truly good political news we’ve read in quite a while.
We’ve convinced ourselves of our destructive capabilities when it comes to violence between nations, and we’ve changed. But I feel like we need images of shadows burned into sidewalks to inspire any kind of action these days.
I don’t know how to change this. I almost wish for enormous tragedies now so that we can fix these problems before they get even worse—the bomb coming earlier might have saved lives if it ended our world wars at an earlier date.
But another way is to keep talking. My first column was about how we can’t seem to find motivation in tragedy, and I’m writing one again after a year in which this trend was even stronger than the last. We have a complacency problem in this country. We need to keep the memory of these tragedies alive long enough to find motivation to change. So I’m writing again with the same observation. Next year I might do the same thing again. I hope I don’t have to.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Monday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.