T-Shirts and Denim

One of many get well cards
sent to Annaka during her recovery
in Pittsburgh.

This is a special time of year, especially for parents with school age children. August marks the transition from the relatively relaxed, slower pace of summer to the more regimented school-days schedule. This specialness is enhanced when both parents also teach, as is the case in our home. I’m not afraid to admit that I did enjoy turning the calendar to September last week.  Autumn, the very best season, begins this month, and by September the craziness that often punctuates the transition from summer to school has at least started to calm down.

I’ve been doing this summer-to-school transition thing professionally for twenty years though, now, and I did it for free seventeen years before that, so you’d think I would be getting used to it. Every school year seems to be different, though, and some years are more different than others.

For example, last year at this time my wife and I, along with Annaka, were in the hospital—again, after coming off a series of hospital visits. This time last year, we were waiting for a liver, praying for a miracle, fully aware that our family was living on borrowed time.

And now? Well, now Annaka is trying to climb up the piano. Now she’s toddling around the house, wrestling with her brother and playing ponies with her sister. Annaka, from a liver standpoint, at least, has been healed.

We are under no delusion that this thing is all over, of course. She will have blood draws at least once a month for the rest of her life and will need to take multiple medicines well into her adulthood.  In fact, we will all return to Pittsburgh in November so her surgeons can once again operate and enclose the muscles in her abdomen.

Regardless, things are better. Annaka sat out the first year of her life in a fog of elevated bilirubin and fuzzy predictions; now she runs in the sun like a wound up watch. 

However, this column isn’t actually going to be about Annaka, whose fifteen seconds of health-related fame, hopefully, are up. What I really want to talk about today are t-shirts.

            Almost every Wednesday of last spring, I would walk into Effingham High School and be greeted by one green shirt after another. Staff and students were wearing Annaka shirts crafted by students down the hallway in the graphic design classroom. These were fundraising shirts worn on Wednesday as a simple gesture of solidarity, as Wednesday was the day we usually traveled to St. Louis for Annaka’s weekly clinics. Every Wednesday for months, this kindness popped up in classrooms and hallways throughout the district, from the high school all the way down to Kindergarten.

            I would say that these gestures were humbling, and they were, but by that point, we had been inundated with so much generosity, from our hometowns and from this community, that there wasn’t really anything left to be humble about. What these gestures really became were very obvious reminders that my wife and I work with some tremendous people. Perhaps this is not really news to many, but in a world where it seems that schools get the privilege of soaking up so much of society’s negativity, I think it’s worth repeating.

Granted, a cynic might respond, “Well, sure, but you guys are in the club. Of course they’re going to help you two out and buy the t-shirts. Who wouldn’t?”

Keep in mind, though, that school personnel throughout the district are still donating to worthy causes, such as the Crisis Nursery of Effingham County. Staff members are still offering up huge amounts of time outside of the classroom for our community’s young people, such as those who benefit from our local Blessings in a Backpack. Column space wouldn’t allow me to list all the various charitable fundraisers and volunteering that goes on by the employees of this school system, but you wouldn’t need to ask very many people before running into someone whose life has been blessed because of such kindness.

 The larger point, though, is that schools get quite a bit of bad press, much of it taken out of context at best and much of it utter nonsense at worst.  In our own fine state, public education has become a political football tossed around by lawmakers who often act as if the whole thing is just an afternoon game of scrimmage.

If nothing else, I simply want to use this forum to let readers know that the people I work with and have worked with for two decades don’t play scrimmage. They’re the real deal, putting students toward the very top of their priority list. I’ve said this before, but I think this is worth repeating as well: Annaka, along with her siblings, along with so many of our young people, have much to look forward to in this life, and a large part of that has to do with the teachers and school personnel waiting to greet them at the end of each summer.

Matches

What would a nuclear war look like? 

During the Cold War, this was a question posed by many people, from strategists at NORAD to script writers in Hollywood. Although variables exist, most predictions ended with some version of MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction. The assumption was that if one of the nuclear powers attacked the other, the defender would simply unload, which would cause the other to unload, and the only creatures left alive to wax philosophic about the whole catastrophe would be the insects crawling beneath our feet.

Weirdly enough, this nihilistic assumption may have saved lives, because no one in charge really wanted any of that to happen. Wars are fought for various reasons, but no rational modern state, the argument went, would wage a war that would not only annihilate its enemies but also everybody else.

Looking back, then, it almost seemed like the Cold War had a kind of “kill switch” that would, in theory, at least, stop the go cart from actually driving into the barn.

With North Korea, though, no such kill switch seems to exist. After all, one thing that kept the United States and the Soviet Union from launching missiles at each other was the relative balance between their nuclear arsenals. One side may have had more ICBM’s, for example, but both sides had more than enough to destroy everything. I’ve used this quote from Carl Sagan in a column before, but it certainly bears repeating now:

“Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger…The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.”

The metaphor now, though, is different. North Korea doesn’t have seven thousand matches, but yesterday it had two, today it has four, and tomorrow it will try to get eight. Regardless, it doesn’t take seven thousand matches to blow up a room filled with gasoline, anyway.

 It takes one.

So, seriously, what would an actual nuclear war look like?

Another quote from Sagan that is worth repeating at length, particularly in light of recent events, concerned his opinion on the supposed usefulness of the hydrogen bomb as peace keeper. Because of its shocking power, some scientists and policy makers believed the weapon would act as deterrent to nuclear holocaust. In his 1995 book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan discusses Edward Teller, the so-called “father” of the hydrogen bomb:

“Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous.”

We have finished with the century of Hitler and Stalin, of course.  Unfortunately, we now find ourselves living in a century also full of irrational actors, with Kim Jong Un taking center stage.

At this point, it may seem as if President Trump must choose between two terrible options:  attack North Korea preemptively, dismantling its nuclear capabilities as quickly as possible, which will likely result in retaliation and tremendous civilian death, or attack North Korea after it actually uses its weapons, an action that will certainly result in tremendous civilian casualties.  One might assume that Kim Jong Un’s survival instincts would kick in before this took place, as any military engagement with the United States would undoubtedly bring about the end of his regime.  Again, however, this assumes a nation-state led by rational actors.

For some policy makers, one supposedly rational actor that has not done enough acting in all of this is China, whom Trump believes should be embarrassed by North Korea’s antics the same way a parent might be when his kid picks up a football in the toy section of Wal-Mart and kicks it into Electronics.  Some even suggest that China could “solve” the North Korean problem unilaterally if it simply treated its neighbor with more “tough” and less “love.”  However, just as one might question how much influence a parent has over a football-kicking child, the same might be asked of China’s supposed power over its disastrous neighbor.

One final quote to consider, this one by Defense Secretary James Mattis in the wake of North Korea’s most recent nuclear tests, outlined the Trump Administration’s potential response to the dilemma:

“We made clear that we have the ability to defend ourselves and our allies, South Korea and Japan from any attack and our commitments among the allies are ironclad. Any threat to the United States and its territories including Guam or our allies will be met with a massive military response — a response both effective and overwhelming."

            So, what will a nuclear war actually look like?  If North Korea continues down this road, the guessing, perhaps among other pursuits, might be over.