Just When Fears of the End Had Faded . . .

It has never been easy to think about the end of the world, and it’s harder than usual today. The sun glints off the Pacific, the roses bloom. Petals drift from the jacaranda trees. Down in his office in a Santa Monica basement Jonathan Parfrey is sitting alone. He is surrounded by files and leaflets. He is a middle-aged activist in a place that is tucked away, which is something that, until just a couple of weeks ago, you could also have said about his cause.

Parfrey is a guy with horn-rimmed glasses and four kids; he is also the executive director of the Los Angeles office of Physicians for Social Responsibility. The organization shared a Nobel Prize in the ‘80s for its antinuclear work, work that, when the Cold War ended, no longer seemed in certain ways to pertain.

Until recently, Parfrey’s group was casting about for new ways to keep the antinuclear fires burning. The Berlin Wall was gone, world conflict had devolved to the tribal, the “big one” seemed to have finally been cut down to size.

People were taking a break from the end of the world, and you get the sense that, his job notwithstanding, Parfrey’s heart would have liked to be with them: “This thing,” he says wryly, “caught most people by surprise.”

The “thing” he refers to is the fact that India now has the big one, the destroyer of worlds, the bomb. In the two weeks since the Indians declared their nuclear capability, Parfrey and his compatriots have scrambled for the appropriate response.

Think globally, act locally. Isn’t that the old saw? But a lot can reveal itself in a decade, and for locals like Parfrey, the revelation has been that how to act in this sort of situation is no longer clear.

“We had to reconvene a meeting of activists who were doing things in the ‘80s,” Parfrey said. Most were pretty flat-footed. The retiree from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom pretty much spoke for everyone when she blurted: “I thought I’d never have to go to another peace meeting again.”

*

What a strange feeling, in this springtime of prosperity, to be forced to face the ol’ arms race again. How unnerving, to hear the foreign version of America’s old redneck rhetoric (“We have to prove that we are not eunuchs!”), just when you were thinking your kids might not have to grow up with the notion that the world could suddenly just end.

A guy I know on the Westside has, for years, taken great pleasure in turning no-nukers away from his doorstep, telling them that he put a Democrat in the White House just so he wouldn’t need to donate to their cause. Even Jerry Rubin, Santa Monica’s resident street peacenik, confessed that he’d long ago stopped stocking antinuclear bumper stickers at his card table on the Third Street Promenade.

And how interesting, psychologically, that we managed for the past decade to put our own nuclear stockpile out of our minds. Twelve thousand seventy warheads we still reportedly have in this country, which you’d think would be enough to prove we are not eunuchs many times.

It’s so unthinkable you don’t want to think about it, so global that it’s almost unbearable to give a local name to what we’ve done. Better to hope it takes care of itself before you have to explain to your kids what duck-and-cover was.

And yet, the nuclear problem also seems so quintessentially human, just a big, quick fix for the rage of the shamed and small. What is a nuclear arsenal if not the global version of that oh-so-familiar inability to feel equal unless you can make the other guy crawl?

*

These sentiments aren’t easy to translate into political action in a place like Los Angeles, on a day like this. Parfrey expects that the coalition will write a letter, try to educate the public, call for the United States to stop developing new weapons and to set an example, fire off e-mails to India in search of like-minded activists.

Outside his office, things are even less certain. The sun is still shining. India is still half a planet away. On the Third Street Promenade, Rubin is still at his card table, handing out pictures of Gandhi and stamping people’s hands with nontoxic peace signs.

At home, the 6-year-old asks about the pretty explosion she sees on the newsmagazine cover. We ignore the question, suggest she go play in the backyard. Is the personal political? Is the global local? Does the little girl on the tire swing really need to know about radioactive fallout and air raid drills? What is the appropriate response?

The jacarandas rustle, and there is a sudden flurry, purple blossoms on the wind. So sad, to have come so close to the peace of forgetting; so hard, to remember the global odds again.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com