I was a nanny for ten years before I became a mother.  I learned a lot.  I miss that job.  I woke up thinking about what I learned.  And I can't get this little clip (Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 by Isao Hashimoto) out of my mind.  How are the two related?

Fifteen years ago a wealthy business man sent a high powered lawyer out for coffee with me.  They were trying very hard to get my testimony to legally wrest the man's child from its mother.  To this day, I am proud of the conversation that transpired.  Its is one of the moments I can point to, in reviewing my life, and say my life and my work matter.  I asked that lawyer: do you realize I am a trained midwife, a professional nanny, a volunteer with the Rape Crisis Center who has advocated for children in the past, and I will never hesitate to advocate for children?  Please put me on the stand.

So here is the thing about those nuclear bombs and soft fat helpless little babies.  Men, and this seems to go double for Republican men, never hesitate to throw the baby out with the bath water in service to their egos.  I'm sorry.  I try really hard to avoid isms, sexism included.  Not all men are this way.  And in talking it over with my husband this morning I admitted, as power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, if women were running the country the result might be the same.

Until humans value life over money and love over materialism, which is to say: children over adults, we will have environmental degradation.  Today, ego satisfaction comes first with our country.  And this is true to varying degree, citizen by citizen, right up the chain of command and culminating with exactly the kind of personality drawn to power.

We are the society that values ours egos more than our children.   We can't wait to put our babies in daycare and get back to work.  We don't value children, we tolerate them.  Barely.  We wait for them to grow up.  Because we are busy doing powerful important things, satisfying our needs and egos at all costs.  We are forgetting what actually matters.   What actually matters has become invisible.   That is the secret shadow, the real inconvenient truth, the thing about to rise and win for all time.

I have never in my life seen such profound wiener shaking, as all this self inflicted bombing.  Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Is it clear to everyone who watches this whole clip, that nuclear testing itself has been a weapon?  Its clear to me.  Oh, the irony.  A father so emotionally and spiritually small and scared he is willing to pull his own child off a wet breast, just to mollify his own ego.  And to grasp at some attempt or illusion of control.  The baby is less important than the ego.

At this point, I think we have safely proven that babies are less important than soda bottles, large screen tvs, second cars, bigger houses, and generally speaking, all things a second income can buy.   Babies are less important than driving cars.  The air we breathe is less important than industry.  Water is less important than development.  How can we be shocked that nuking our own land is less important than international posturing?

The child I was charged to care for, by the way, was never taken from his wonderful mother and is now off to college.  The father is a local politician.