stopping the bombs in Oakridge, Tennessee

I came home from Oakridge tired from the sun and two days on the bus and the emotions.

Buddhists from a Zen temple in Asheville, North Carolina, led the march. Their leaders wore saffron robes and they all carried small drums which they played as we walked. Two miles later, at the entrance to the weapons plant, it looked like we were making a Spielberg film. Protesters in colorful, rumpled clothing with handmade signs stood on one side of the gate with the chanting Buddhists. On the other side, fifty feet away, their faces made blurry by the waves of heat in the air, police in flak jackets stared us down from behind their mirrored sunglasses as police cars, SUVs and an armored military vehicle made a another barrier behind them.

I am describing the scene to my husband and my daughter. I tell them how the Buddhists were chanting the entire time at the gate, beating their drums in slow time as their leader chanted a call and the others chanted a response. "But why were there so many police?' my little girl wants to know. "That's a good question." I say. "To protect the bomb factory from the Buddhists, I guess." She laughs out loud. Her dad is a Buddhist. She knows that Buddhists do not harm anyone.

I am trying to make it sound ridiculous, because it is. I think that if one of us had suddenly jumped that gate, the police would have killed that person, the protection of the bomb factory being more important than our lives.

As I describe the protestors and the police and the factory officials staring at each other in the 95 degree heat, my husband says, "It makes you wonder who the protest is for." My husband is a composer. He is wondering about the lack of audience.

I know who it is for. It is for those of us whose taxes pay to make nuclear weapons that can destroy all five boroughs of Manhattan in a second. It is for the people of the town of Oakridge, Tennesse, where radioactive waste from this factory of death has poisoned all the water and threatens the health of all the residents. It is for the ones who survived the weapons of mass destruction that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for those who did not. It is for the pilot of the Enola Gay, who didn’t know better until it was too late for everyone. It is for me, in my helplessness and complicity. It is for anyone who needs to stand in front of the place where they manufacture the potential for mass killing and say to no one, “This is not me. This is not me. This is not the way I am. I am some other way. This cannot be me. “