Suicide Protests :: Suicidal Drugs Pills Papers

self-annihilation Protests An eager young activistic with a thick cinnamon beard shouted at his swell Brown students who whisked hurriedly past his table and into the post office in the spring of 1984. Few, if any, had time to get wind to a lunatic raging almost the end of the world and nuclear disarmament. An older woman stopped to listen to his angry litany Do you know that the government expects you to survive a nuclear war in your dorm basement? he asked. The woman paused, contemplating. Finally, she answered, wherefore dont you start a club, Students for Suicide Pills? since, she said, suicide pills seem a go against option than any fallout shelter. Jason Salzman did not take the proposal as a joke as it was intended. Instead, he immediately visualized Students for Suicide Tablets (SST). Justifying the existence of such an odd, morbid group of students caused a major logistical problem how to find members who would consider joining. Salzman had a group of activist fri ends, entirely he was tired of long meetings and the apathy of his peers about the seriousness of nuclear war. Many were diligent in 1981 and 1982 about circulating anti-nuclear weapons petitions around campus and tending in 1982 the nations largest peaceful protest in New York City to contain a nuclear freeze. The idea seemed to have lost its novelty, however, and instead was replaced by a pervasive Reagan-esque attitude that nuclear war was an inevitable and winnable showdown. The ecstasy of the 1980s was filled with patriotic rhetoric about staying ahead in the nuclear arms race, with the heads of both superpowers insistent on playing a game of nuclear chess, instead of engaging in earnest intelligence about disarmament. The US was both on the offensive and defensive, demonstrated by Reagans paranoid, expensive and useless Star Wars defense system in 1983. nearly the world, protestors in Rome, Bonn, and London demanded Soviet-American negotiations, yet Reagan de-prioritized arms reductions talks during the early 1980s. In the midst of the largest peacetime arms buildup, military spending was upwards of $28 one million million an hour while Reagan spewed forth his devil theory about the Soviet Union being an evil empire willing to lie and tackle to struggle for a communist world. Indeed, the idea of nuclear war became so commonplace that comments about the frivolity of credit cards and the high pizzaz of the common shovel after a nuclear attack became the cold-blooded jokes of a cynical conversation.