A Debt of Gratitude
Written by Tara Villalba, August 2021
On Tuesday August 3, days before the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, representatives from Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Washington Against Nuclear Weapons Coalition (WANW) joined Seattle Indivisible, Seattle Anti-War Coalition, 350 Seattle, and Washington Poor People’s Campaign for a demonstration at Seattle’s Henry M. Jackson Federal Building.
Together we called on Washington state’s Congressional Delegation to cut the Pentagon’s bloated budget and divest from nuclear weapons development.
The issue of demilitarization is deeply personal and a central pillar of my work and life. I am a single mom to three young people and I live and work on the beautiful traditional territories of the Lummi Nation, in what is now known as Bellingham.
I owe Lummi Nation a debt for their primary relationship with their place and for protecting it for generations. I’m bound and governed by the treaty they signed with the US government, that allows me and my kids to live here.
I also owe the Lummi people an obligation to protect their homelands so they can continue to live and practice their life ways. My grandmother taught me that this is what it means to be human. To be human is to make and maintain, and when necessary, to repair mutual relationships.
I grew up on an island across the Pacific. My grandmother and the saltwater both taught me about keeping balance in an always-moving ocean. If I wanted to move through the ocean, she and I needed to have a mutual relationship.
I was taught that the ocean makes all life possible. We now know that 50-80% of the oxygen production on Earth comes from the oceans and that the ocean sequesters exponentially more carbon than the land does.
In Tagalog, we have the concept of “utang na loob”. This roughly translates as “debt of gratitude”. It’s not a debt we can pay back with money. But it can be paid in kind. I’m alive because people before me and the planet today extended mercy, generosity, and hospitality, allowing me to make my home and instilling within me the obligation to pay that debt forward.
One my responsibilities as a human is to reciprocate that generosity. Our main defense against isolation, destruction and ultimately, death, is to extend a generous welcome and mutual support to each other. Utang na loob reminds us that we are each other’s best defense from harm and each other’s source of security.
At eight years old, my dad taught me about nuclear weapons by telling me about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I couldn’t understand how any country could invent anything that would deliberately kill so many people and poison the planet. It was the ultimate act of avarice.
I grew up under a dictator supported by the United States. I grew up under what’s called low intensity conflict where military forces were trained, funded, and armed by the United States to wage war against their own people using abductions, torture, and extra-judicial killings. They especially targeted poor people. My own dad was disappeared when I was 13. He was held and tortured for eight days before my mother found him.
The United States’ military industrial complex makes it unlikely to make and maintain mutual relationships. Faced with constant war and attacks, the war machine forces us into dominant and defensive postures.
The war machine threatened to take my father’s life away, and further threatens other families across the world and particularly across the global south. The war machine then empowers those with the bombs (particularly in the global north) and allows them to force their ways, agenda, and will on others.
State violence makes life harsher and makes us less mutually human with each other. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate threat of state violence, the most horrible manifestation of our cruelest ambitions and imaginations.
Most may think that the "deterrent" nature of nuclear weapons means we will never use them. However, even if we hadn’t instantly killed over 130,000 by detonating atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would still be hundreds of thousands of lives lost to nuclear weapons research, production, testing, and to negligent and shortsighted radioactive waste disposal.
In the meantime, the US military remains the single biggest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and their carbon footprint doesn’t even factor into the calculations for US emissions. The military is not being held accountable for their enormous share in causing the present and future climate catastrophe. Instead the first and most severe costs will be the burden of the nations they have helped to impoverish. Like the Marshall Islands, and my home islands of the Philippines.
I have a responsibility to the generations after me to fix the deadly messes that people far away from our islands made generations before I was even born. I have inherited a legacy of violence, cruelty, and the increasing likelihood of an unlivable future. So have each of you.
Our children and grandchildren are forced to live with a polluted, heated up mostly unlivable planet… but the generation after them… our children’s grandchildren might see things get better.
If we act on the recommendations of the IPCC report published on August 9 and make the big changes we need to make now, then we can build a mutual relationship with our planet and a joyful, healthy, and vibrant future.
When we resist the existence and modernization of nuclear weapons and invest in immediate solutions to the climate crisis we can find the balance with our oceans, lands, and each other needed to simply live.
Within 20 miles of Seattle, a couple of thousand nuclear warheads are actively deployed at Naval Base Kitsap. Nuclear-armed submarines patrol the Salish Sea, endangering all our lives and spending millions of dollars that could go to shoreline & salmon habitat restoration, the construction of more solar panels, and a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel and weapons industries into green & livable jobs.
We can’t wait. We must be the generation that finishes this fight and dismantles all nuclear weapons so our children, their children, and their grandchildren can practice the welcome and generosity our ancestors intended for each of us.
Please join Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and Washington Against Nuclear Weapons with a donation today and as an advocate for a livable future.
Together, we can bring about an end to the extractive economy and state violence that ruined so much of the present moment and that threatens every moment yet to come.
Thank you for partnering with me and our friends and colleagues at WPSR in this work.