No Nukes! At the Red Cross/Red Crescent Museum

Today was one of the saddest days of my entire life. I am not going into details. Those of you who are close friends know I am in a process of reviewing and revising my entire life and, at almost 62, this is certainly NOT EASY.

What do you do then when you mope so low that the floors never get dry from tears and dampness of abject thoughts? You go to Geneva’s Red Cross/Red Crescent Museum!

I took the bus into Geneva. This was my second time on the bus. Yesterday I went to visit a friend of a friend of my mother’s. Yes. That is a story in itself that I am not telling now. This woman is the widow of Andre Rey, a psychologist from the University of Geneva who was a contemporary and professional nemesis of Piaget himself. (“No one takes Piaget’s theories seriously now, at least not in Switzerland!” was one of the first things she told me yesterday, before she showed me the plaque commemorating the centennial of her husband’s birth on the front of her three hundred year old farm house.)

I took the bus today into Geneva. I knew where to get off, at the Croix Rouge stop. All the stops have names. They are within three zones. You buy the ticket for the zones you want to cross in a machine at the stop, with exact change or a card. You validate the ticket once in the bus to show the time—they last one hour you can travel with that ticket. It is unlikely anyone will ask to see your ticket. The company believes you do have one, with the right time, and you will not cheat. All of this knowledge I acquired in the last 24 hours.

I have visited the museum another time when in Switzerland almost ten years ago. I wanted to see a special exhibit, “Un-security”. This is about the dangers of nuclear power. The exhibit is short and to the point. It starts with the ideas and scientific discoveries related to radioactive materials. A documentary at the beginning shows the history of nuclear power and weapons and the men associated with them (Marie Curie, exception). They are entirely Western, European and Euro-American. They are what we call “White” civilization ideas and scientific discoveries.

Then there are pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and objects photographed after the explosions. One watch, found years later in a river bed, shows the exact time of the bombing, 8:15 a.m. The US bombed these people. Almost 75 thousand instantly dead, some vaporized, and the same number of people horribly injured. We still want to do this to others. We may do it if we do not really change the minds of the people who grab power here.

Then there are pictures of Chernobyl’s disaster: those who died instantly, the ghost city that remains so contaminated; the children born mentally retarded or with physical deformities; the old people who returned to plow contaminated land because they preferred to stay in their homeland rather than to be nothing, feeling alienated somewhere else. The Russians are to blame for their carelessness towards people and the environment.

Then there were pictures contrasting ordinary activities going on around "monster" nuclear power plants in Europe. People swimming and sun bathing happily on the beach right beside a nuclear power plant, in France. Two old ladies talking to each other, overlooking a British nuclear power plant. Grapevines and fruits grown on land besides a nuclear power plant in Spain.

There were no pictures of Scriba. Or Oswego. I looked.

Germany is the first Western power to decommission all of its nuclear power plants by the year 2012. I did not know that. Do you know about it? Yeah!

The last part of the exhibit showed all manner of nuclear missiles that the US owns to deploy if the nuclear warmongers decide that it is time to experiment extinguishing human beings somewhere else to just show them who’s the boss. The photographer is an American who decided to visit silos to learn more about them and to document, at the time, the dawn of a new anti-nuclear era. He has concluded since that he was wrong thinking that things were about to change.

The biggest point of the exhibit is that there is a lot of talk again about nuclear energy and renewed effort to create even more potent nuclear weapons. It shows how the two efforts are related. It calls for us, from a Red Cross perspective, to think long and hard about these options. They are awfully destructive.

I almost stopped my personal whining after watching “Un-security” and revisiting the permanent Red Cross exhibit downstairs, documenting all of the wars that have taken place from 1863 to 1990, and the founding and efforts of the Red Cross/Red Crescent towards alleviating the plight of the wounded. Having lived in New Mexico, the cradle of nukes, however, I have become sort of immune to greater feelings about them. I feel only a little better after looking at the impact of real mushroom clouds outside of my very own, home grown inside my heart and soul.