I am a Nuclear Veteran and have seen and felt, up close and too personal, the horror that our Executive and Military treat so lightly. I’m a survivor of the tests, thousands weren’t. I recovered from my exposure, many didn’t.
*Our planet is balancing on a knife edge of pollution, war, runaway heating, population growth. A nuclear exchange might well be the end. Ask the surviving residents of Rongalap.
*All nuclear weapons must go. Nuclear power is proving to be just a slow moving bomb with spills and leaks in aging reactors, and then there is Fukushima.
I Have Seen the Dragon
I have seen the Dragon
Through clenched lids and arms pressed tight.
I have felt its hot breath on my back
And listened to the rumble of its voice.
I have looked upon its breath,
Glowing Amethyst, red and purple,
Climbing towards the stratosphere
To deposit its venom downwind.
I have waited in fear as my gums began to bleed
And my hair came out in clumps.
I breathed a prayer of thanks
As I began to heal.
After fifty years, our ranks are thin,
We who have seen the Dragon and survived.
Those who have died or are sickened still,
Their numbers are legion.
All we can hope for, work for, pray for,
Is that no madman will ever be allowed
To unleash the Dragon again.
For its legacy to all is death, disease and decay.
© Stephen M. Osborn
2 November 2006
*There was a time when we used Diplomacy to defuse situations, to ward off conflicts and war. Now that the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex have found the enormous profits in war and conflict, they seem to have discarded common sense in their search for profits and power.
*It is way past time for We the People to cast out these profiteers from government and reestablish Diplomacy, mutual respect and help, to solve the problems of the world.
*Virtually every religion, every philosophy, going back thousands of years, has made the statement, "Do not unto others as you would not have done unto you."
*Yet the rulers of this country seem only to say, “Destroy those who do not kowtow to us. We the powerful, with the destruction of the world at our fingertips, demand that the world obey us, allow us license to take what we want, rule whom we want and destroy those who resist.”
*Time for some constructive change.
;-})