Holy shit, WalMart. pic.twitter.com/FiMdAms0c3
— jordan ???? (@JordanUhl) August 9, 2017
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While we’re all wondering when the unthinkable became so damned mundane, here’s an amazing story from the Washington Post:
Like any good student with a sensitive question, Harold Hering approached his teacher after class, out of earshot from his classmates.
“How can I know,” he asked, “that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”
It was 1973. President Richard M. Nixon was seriously depressed about Watergate. Hering, an Air Force major who rescued downed pilots in Vietnam, was training to be a missileer — the guy who turns the keys to commence nuclear Armageddon.
“I assumed there had to be some sort of checks and balances so that one man couldn’t just on a whim order the launch of nuclear weapons,” Hering, now 81, told Radiolab in a remarkable interview earlier this year.
Hering was wrong. And decades later, so is anyone who thinks President Trump, having recently threatened “fire and fury” for North Korea, can’t order a nuclear attack anytime he darn well pleases, even from a fairway bunker on the golf course.
Just ask Hering.
Back in 1973, the drama that followed Hering’s question did not, as he hoped, fundamentally alter the fate of the world, but it certainly reshaped his life. Forced to retire, Hering took up a career with a less dangerous set of keys: long-haul trucking…
All these years later, Hering does not regret asking the forbidden question. After driving trucks, he became an addiction counselor to homeless people at the Salvation Army. He lives in Indiana. He still worries.
“It bothers me immensely that the only area there is not a check and balance is the one that could literally result in the end of the world,” he told Radiolab. “That seems strange to me.”…
And yet!… We are still here, somehow; and Mr. Hering seems to have had a good life, helping other people. Sometimes the minion enables the monster; sometimes the minion makes the better choice.
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Apart from meditating upon the unthinkable, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: The ‘Comfort’ of Long PracticePost + Comments (194)