December 2019 – Physicians for Civil Defense

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(6): November 2019 (published December 2019)

Global street theater this year has featured the Extinction Rebellion movement (XR), which began last year in Britain and claims to have chapters in 50 countries and to have held protests in 60 cities in Turkey, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere. Its flag displays a stylized hourglass in a circle. Protests often feature demonstrators wearing white masks and red costumes, and copious amounts of fake blood.

XR is aligned with the school strike movement reportedly inspired by Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Thunberg, after attending a global climate change summit in Madrid, lamented that millions of students “striking” had “achieved nothing.” Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise. “The current world leaders are betraying us and we will not let that happen anymore,” Thunberg said in a brief speech to a crowd of 15,000 protesters (https://tinyurl.com/rmj39jj).

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(5): September 2019 (published Decembrt 2019)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost, 1920

According to one of his biographers, Robert Frost’s most famous poem, “Fire and Ice,” was inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The structure of the poem with two short last lines evokes the downward funnel of the rings of hell, with sins of passion at the top and the worst offenders, the traitors Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius, at the bottom submerged in ice up to their neck.