By Chris Keppie
Blue sky, fluffy
clouds, farmers making hay. Cricket being won by England. In, to woody
Berkshire lanes. 240,000 hours of knitting, purling, thinking, caring, from all
across our country and our world, which, this Nagasaki Day, became 7 miles of
scarf - pink and beautiful, rolled out, sewn together, and held, in song and
noise and silence; held to link and expose, once again, 2 grey, vast, concrete,
wired abominations: our country’s nuclear bomb factories.
Aldermaston and
Burghfield atomic weapons establishments make the nuclear fuel and casements
for our country’s Trident missiles. Some more numbers. 1 Vanguard submarine
holds 8 Tridents, each holding 5 warheads, each 8 times more powerful than the
bomb which killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. At least 1 of our 4 subs is on
patrol all the time, with the ready potential, then, of murdering 45 million
people (3x even the number killed in WW1).
As we mourn and
condemn the slaughter and trauma of our cousins in Gaza, Israel, Iraq, Syria,
Mali, and on and on, and remember the war that didn’t end all wars, let us also
mourn and condemn weapons of most mass destruction, hidden in our seas here and
now. Let us loudly say NO to our elected representatives as they sickeningly
consider renewal of Trident over the next two years. The so-called deterrence
argument rests on the premise that we would ever could ever condone sending
these missiles of indiscriminate genocide and evil. It’s that simple. Nothing
can justify it. Nothing fluffy or woolly about that. Oh, and a secondary point.
What good things could we spend £100 billion on instead?
Such thanks and
praise to Stroud’s very own Jaine Rose for leading this extraordinary Wool
Against Weapons campaign over the last 20 months and for speaking so movingly
and for being so moving at our milestone and on her bike; and to CND and
ActionAWE for their ongoing prophetic brilliance; and to Molly Scott Cato MEP
for her Quakerly Green voice; and to Thames Valley Police for eating cake with
us; and to all who stitched and sang and smiled a tiny part of the awesome
alternate whole. It felt like pure worship. I feel overwhelmingly privileged to
have belatedly join the rewooloution :)
See Molly and more at Wool Against Weapons at: http://stroudcommunity.tv/molly-wool-2/
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