Parable

I've been reading David Remnick's excellent piece on Barack Obama in the New Yorker and thinking about (of course) nuclear weapons. One of the points Remnick makes is that Obama subtly recast the Civil Rights story from a guilt story into a national progress story. 

The key pronoun is always “we,” or “us.” The historical fight for equal rights comes only at the end of a peroration on national purpose:

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope—hope is what led me here today. 

The civil-rights struggle is deftly recast in terms not of national guilt but of national progress: the rise of the Joshua generation. What the African-American left once referred to as the “black freedom struggle” becomes, in Obama’s terms, an American freedom struggle.

It seems to me that we have to recast the nuclear weapons story. It has to stop being a tale of apocalypse, stop being the story of a Frankenstein monster gone out of control; it needs to be recast. What sort of story can we tell about nuclear weapons that will give people the courage to think about getting rid of them? How can we make the nuclear weapons story one of hope? How can we feel good about where we are, and where we are going?

For sixty years anti-nuclear people have tried to get the weapons abolished by making people feel endangered and frightened. They have used slogans like, "There has never been a terrible weapon that hasn't been used," which, if it isn't designed to make us feel bad about ourselves, what is it's purpose? The anti-nuclear story needs to be uplifting if it is to be successful.