The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it has ever been. 90 seconds to midnight. Midnight is when the world as we know it ends.

Tick tock. As I write this, Israel continues to bomb Gaza. Barely any food or supplies can enter the city where two million people struggle to survive. Everyone is hungry and too many people are starving. Arif Husain, of the UN World Food Program, claims that conditions inside of Gaza are the worst that he’s seen. All of this takes place on a very narrow strip of land on which Israel also keeps around 90 nuclear warheads. The Israeli government behaves hyper defensively, the way nuclear powers usually do. After all, the first rule of warfare is that all of your own weapons can be used against you.

Between reading about Gaza, I check my email. I get daily messages from Pennie, Philadelphia’s medicine insurance provider, reminding me that I have to buy insurance. That’s a few hundred a month. Damn. Buying the insurance reminds me that we’re supposed to plan for retirement. What does that mean? Is there a point in saving for the future?

Tick tock. I check the news again. Russia escalates attacks in Ukraine on the first day of the new year. North Korea has successfully tested its first long range nuclear missile and is now in the mass manufacturing phase of development. Tick tock. The US continues to build military bases in the Philippines and doubles its personale in Taiwan. Xi Jinping threatens Taiwan in his new year remarks, purges nine generals from the People’s Liberation Army to consolidate power, and revives China’s nuclear base. Tick tock. Israel strikes a residential neighborhood in Beirut. Tick Tock. The two Koreas fire shells into disputed waters after deciding to remove the 2018 inter-Korea pact.

I text friends in fear. Then, I apologize for being a doomer. There’s no reason for my bad mood to infect others.

There’s work to do so I try to do that. The emails pile up. Tick tock.

There’s no news about Congo or about Sudan. There’s barely any news about Burma. 2023 was the hottest year on record. Tick tock. We’re entering the era of global boiling. Electric car companies are trying to get all of us to replace our gas guzzling vehicles with machines that run on lithium, all of which is sourced from sick children working underground for hours and hours.

I prepare a meal and do the dishes. Tick tock. I can’t even drive.

Maybe this is it for humanity. Where is the humanity? We are here, hostages in a world ruled by nine nuclear powers and unable to fathom a resistance powerful enough to match the totalizing destruction that we know a post-Hiroshima world to be capable of delivering. I think that this is an effect of the post-nuclear age. When we imagine oppression, we imagine it as almost totalizing. In the past, people understood oppression to be a temporary condition and something worth resisting. Is that why we are so afraid to revolt, to infiltrate, to sabotage now? Because we know that power has harnessed the atom?

Has absolute power become absolute truth?

How do you resist an empire that wields the power of a nuclear bomb?

Natural disasters aren't natural. It’s war. Disasters are manufactured. War also isn’t just war. There is no such thing as legitimate war, unless you believe that some governments have the right to violence. War is also famine, floods, and illness. In disasters, the most vulnerable are always the first to go. None of us are safe as long as the most vulnerable among us faces peril.

Tick tock.

I don’t know what kind of person looks around at this world that is very obviously dying and thinks, “We need to make more bombs.” What kind of psychology is this? I try to figure it out and give up.

In the United States, there are approximately twice as many guns as people. If we got rid of half of the guns, there would still be enough for every single person to fire a gun at the same time. If you have ten guns, you still really only have one gun that you can use at one time. Like other commodities (Stanley cups, smartphones, Squishmallows) guns proliferate. Americans have too many. Weapons waste the most resources and technology. In the end, like other commodities that we have too much of, weapons end up as trash. Grenade shells, tanks, bombers, and guns all create tremendous amounts of trash in the world. What a waste of scientific ingenuity and money. In addition, weapons seek to waste valuable human lives and cities, turning cultural hubs into wasteland.

In the period after World War Two, there was a plethora of self determination campaigns. We are still in that period in many ways. But self determination doesn’t remove the colonial powers. It adjusts to their logic, adopting nationalism to speak to and negotiate with empire. Self determination was and remains a compromise. It doesn’t get rid of the nuclear bombs. It inevitably competes with them.

Who could ever compete with a nuclear power? Negotiate with one?

I’m not a militant. I’m sorry for that. I have guerilla fighters in my lineage and I’m not a militant. I believe that a revolution won by organized violence can only maintain lives organized by violence. The revolution is what life after the revolution looks like. I believe that a military robs its own people first and I believe that the most violent and commonly used weapon is and will always remain famine. Maybe this is foolish but I believe this even in a post nuclear age.

Famine kills faster than any weapon and famine has only one solution. Food. It’s not enough to just drop our weapons. We have to be willing to feed each other, to create conditions that nourish life instead of murder. Ceasefire is not enough. People need access to their fields. Fields need access to freshwater and nutrition. Life is harder to foster than death.

I need to believe that we know how to feed each other. People have been doing it for as long as we’ve been around. I need to believe that people fundamentally care about each other and our violence towards one another is temporary. I need oppression to be temporary and not total. Otherwise, justice becomes a religion instead of a movement. We start to fetishize our wounds, believing them to hold absolute truth, instead of believing and building towards possibility.

In a post nuclear age, I need to believe in a world where power is determined not by who has the most weapons but by who nourishes the most life.

I think of the Palestinian woman who grows flowers using leftover grenade shells. This, too, is humanity. Will there someday be flowers growing inside the shells of nuclear missiles? I don’t know if those flowers exist yet, if they have mutated into existence yet. Maybe the whole world is like a grenade shell. Maybe, someday, the world will be a husk and flowers that don’t exist yet will grow.

Is that our future? What if our sense of “our” is gone by then? If the world is a grenade shell and flowers that don’t exist yet will someday grow, then this is a future but not our future. That’s an option too. If there is truly no way to remove the hold that colonial nuclear powers have on this world we all live in, then there will still be a future but it won’t be our future. The clock is ticking but the future is always arriving.