October 2, 2026

Thank you for coming to the City Council this past Wednesday; keep speaking out!

Dear friends -- 

Good afternoon everybody. 

For those who came this past Wednesday (9/30/26) to request consideration by the Santa Fe City Council of a resolution "objecting to the expansion of nuclear weapons work and the production of plutonium warhead cores at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and opposing additional LANL facilities in Santa Fe" -- THANK YOU. 

We made a pretty good showing, thanks to a few of you -- and much more so thanks to the UNM students who came from the Albuquerque Students for Nuclear Disarmament (AND) and Youth Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA). There was also a strong representation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) from both Santa Fe and Albuquerque. All in all, there were 17 speakers supporting the draft resolution, plus others who came in support but didn't speak.

I would like to emphasize that the young people present were all quite eloquent. You can see most of the presentations here (the City's video is here). Unfortunately, three out of eight city councilors were not in the room. They may have been watching and listening on-line. We hope so. 

As far as we know, the only media coverage was a single sentence in the Santa Fe New Mexican. This is understandable, but see below. 

We are preparing a very short highlights video for social media, which we will send around ASAP -- perhaps you can send it farther when you get it. 

We will be talking further with city councilors next week while preparing other actions. Stay tuned, and if you haven't done so we encourage you to write the Mayor and City Council. 

We also encourage you to reach out to organizations, religious communities, and businesses as well as individuals to endorse "The Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Disarmament" (also at StopTheBomb.org). 

Non-thinking is now normal -- even normative

In trying to communicate uncomfortable truths as we were doing Wednesday night, we fear that many -- perhaps most -- members of the intended audience aren't engaging intellectually but rather emotionally -- if they were engaging at all. We hope the young speakers Wednesday night were truly "heard" by members of the City Council, but we have our doubts.

Without intending even the slightest criticism to the hard-working New Mexican journalist there (Carina Julig), the same is true for most of the news media. 

For one reason or another our news media usually cannot afford to engage intellectually with a $30 billion program to build a factory to make weapons of mass destruction. Our language professionals have lost their tongues. 

They are not alone. Equally if not more absent and silent are representatives of our religious communities, upon whose thoughts the matter of state-approved mass violence should weigh heavily. 

How can we achieve a just society when we are spending more than $11,000 per U.S. household on the military, including nuclear weapons? Simone Weil famously wrote, "Only he who knows the empire of might and knows how not to respect it is capable of love and justice." Getting our share of the nuclear-military loot is not a decent answer. 

Acceptance of nuclear weapons in Santa Fe is not just normal. In some quarters it has become normative. Someone remarked to us about two decades ago that "In Santa Fe polite society, questioning LANL is something that is simply not done." 

This normalization is similar but more extreme than what Alexei_Yurchak and then Adam Curtis called "hypernormalisation." Questioning the appropriateness of LANL's explosive growth, or its manifold "benefits," or its claim to a privileged status in society overall, is close to an Orwellian "thoughtcrime" in some circles.  

But not everywhere. Far from it. It's just that too too many good people do not speak out. There is too little "bold speech, come what may" (parrhesia), in general and in this matter in particular. 

A few of you on this list will recall a certain Zen teacher who reminded us that while silence can be golden, it is more often just yellow.  

In his important book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (key passage scanned here), Matthias Desmet reminds us that "The first and foremost task [in a totalitarian society or a society afflicted with "mass formation"] is to keep speaking out. Everything stands or falls with the act of speaking out. It is in the interest of all parties." 

It is not unusual or newsworthy for 17 people to speak in favor of a piece of legislation at the Santa Fe City Council. What is unusual -- and troubling -- is years of silence and failure to intellectually engage in the pros and cons of a $30 billion project to make weapons of mass destruction on the part of the Council and also the town's leading newspaper. 

For thinking people, it's not the number of people that matters -- it's the importance of what they are pointing out. We aren't that important, but a new factory to add more nuclear weapons to the U.S. nuclear arsenal, in our state and our town, at a cost of roughly triple the annual budget of the whole state government, and with vast environmental and social impacts -- that's important. 

Santa Fe is still in many ways a small town, and New Mexico, a small state. Our voices matter. We must use them. Doing so will benefit everybody, not least ourselves.  

Greg Mello