Are We Just Stupid?

Are we just stupid? Why would anyone consider dissolving or burning serious chemical weapons at sea? I can hear all the reassurances – “But it’s not really sarin … it’s just the ingredients to make sarin. They haven’t been put together yet!” or “Once they’ve been burned they are harmless – just some kind of chemical salts.” Okaaaa-a-ayyy…and then what? Dump the dissolved salts or ashes into the ocean? What if there’s an accident at sea? Where is the oversight to make sure there are no “accidents”? Here is a quote from the New York Times. “The proposal (to destroy chemical weapons at sea)… focuses on a highly sophisticated mobile system, which is designed to convert chemical agents into compounds that cannot be used for military purposes by mixing them with water and other chemicals and then heating them…” This statement hints that “military purposes” are a top priority in our lives. What about life? What about protecting our assets – the oceans?  What about common sense? Aren’t we doing enough damage by dumping our garbage in the Atlantic Ocean every day? Hasn’t the disaster at Fukushima and the ongoing death process in the Pacific Ocean been enough of a tragedy? Here is another interesting statement that I am going to take out of context, but which perfectly illustrates our government’s attitude: “We are not without other alternatives…In fact, we are actively pursuing two other alternatives which provide us a complete capacity to do the destruction and to meet the schedule.” I know that John Kerry was talking about chemical weapons when he said this, but the statement jumped off the page at me as a statement that represented the U.S. approach to everything. It says that we are all about destruction. We have several alternatives for it. We are focused on the capacity to destroy completely. We even have a schedule for it. How can we survive if we are focused on destruction? And people who focus on maintaining whatever power they already have will never find the bandwidth to explore and develop anything new. They end up outdated and overpowered. Perhaps Kerry’s words would not have had such an impact on me if I could see any signs of creative, peaceable, caring relationships being built between the U.S. and other countries. Or between the Earth, the Oceans, the Sky, and the rest of Life. Our relationships are all about domination, abuse of power, and destruction.