I wish I could tell you that once in Vegas I settled in to a comfortable life.
I did install myself in a cute little apartment, in a complex tucked next to the hills on the west side of town (and strategically chosen for its proximity to some of my favorite hiking spots). Next it was the usual admin tasks: new license and registration from the DMV, updating things with the DoD and VA, a myriad of change-of-address forms, all mixed in with the drudgery and excitement of settling in to a new home. I slept, and hiked, cooked my favorite dishes, and slept some more. I painted, an ensō a day, and played with yarn. I found the local library and began devouring books, and occasionally sat at a local monastery.
It was nice to be home, a little unsettling, but nice.
As I checked off items on the relocation chores list, my days grew longer and I came face to face with the question I had been avoiding: what to do next. I had hoped this journey would help me find a new ‘why’ beyond the caricature of grief I had been wearing for so long. But instead all I had was new questions and doubts.
In the years leading up to this journey, I had become interested in non-violent resistance. I had studied Gene Sharp’s civil disobedience strategies, Phillip Hammack’s discussions of conflicting narratives, and Daniel Bar-Tal’s explorations of how delegitimizing and demonizing an enemy legitimates “intense, vicious, violent, and prolonged intergroup conflict”. I had chosen my retreat locations in part, to study with teachers affiliated with U.S. anti-war movements. But as I sat, first at one center and then the other, I had become deeply disappointed.
It had begun with the self-righteous tone of some of the dharma talks, and grown as I was castigated for thinking the teachings might ease the psychological suffering of fellow veterans. As the 70th anniversary of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” approached* and the folding origami cranes increased in intensity**, retreat leaders began to demonize the workers at Los Alamos for their parts in military efforts. I realized they were following the same patterns I seen in the research, using the same language and tone groups of my friends used when discussing the Middle East or other brown people. Even more discouraging, when I asked after the workers’ inherent humanity or emotional or moral conflicts they might have with their work (such as those Oppenheimer had is his later years) I was swiftly dismissed. I began to question the integrity of the group’s practice, and began to wonder whether lack of movement on disarmament was, in part, a result of this dissonance.
During the drive from Florida, these doubts spread to the safety world. During my last months in Connecticut I had begun to hear colleagues muse that human factors errors (such as controlled flight into terrain) were not the result of system design or incompatibilities, but rather that the pilots were “too stupid to live”. I reflected as the miles passed, especially on the fact there had been little movement over the years on the types of accidents, those were crews operated at the edge of system limitations in response to mission pressures, that had killed so many of my friends. Now, as my move-in checklist neared completion, my days grew long and my thoughts returned to these questions.
I wondered why the usability testing that had proved so useful with our phones and video games had not circled back to aviation where it had begun. I wondered why high reliability, a theory of shared mental models developed by researchers studying aircraft carrier operations, had been adopted so successfully by woodland firefighters and intermodal transporters but not by manufacturing industries. I re-read the Columbia return-to-flight report, which questioned why and how NASA’s culture had so quickly returned to the conditions observed during the Challenger investigation. And I wondered.
And every evening, as the sun dipped behind the mountains on the west side of town, I went for a walk.
*These are the two atomic devices that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.