Protest

Some people I know are very anti-nuke. They have strong opinions about nuclear bombs and believe that all nuclear weapons should be banished from the earth. Humanity's place on this planet changed for the worse after World War II when America exploded the first atomic bombs, they feel.

My friend Alan loves big explosions. Growing up he always was the kid with the firecrackers. And it seemed that he was working constantly in his garage to create explosives. I wondered how his parents didn’t know.

Once Alan made a bomb in a film cannister and we went out at night to blow it up on the field at our school. It had snowed that day and school was cancelled. We thought it would be cool to blow a big crater in the snow. When we got up there and the school custodian was outside shoveling snow we chickened out. But so that it wasn't a total waste we wrote "I hate school" in the snow with our pee and broke a bottle.

These days, whenever we’re together with our anti-nuke friends and the conversation inevitably turns to nuclear bombs, Alan always says that he’d love to see all those big explosions going off at once. He says, "Can't you just see the looks on children's faces? It would be like the best and biggest Fourth of July ever."

This really makes my anti-nukes friends mad. They yell back at Alan that nuclear weapons are dangerous and they can kill us all. And then Alan says that knives are dangerous, too. He'll say, "More people are killed every year by knives than are killed by atomic bombs." Just when my anti-nuke friends are getting really red in the face Alan asks, "How come there isn't an anti-knife movement? Hmm? How come?" When they begin to sputter in anger Alan starts jumping up and down, shaking his fists in the air and shouting, "Stabby! Stabby! No more knives! Stabby! Stabby! No more knives!" It's so hard not to laugh when he does that.