On Wednesday, August, 20, I go to protest—as I do every Wednesday at 6:30 am Eastern Time—at local arms profiteer, L3Harris. I know something might be up, because one of my companions at last week's L3 demonstration warned me that people plan to block the company driveway. The police will make arrests. Protest leaps deftly over a small barrier to become civil disobedience.

I have attended countless demonstrations across my accumulating decades, but had never distinguished myself sufficiently to be chosen for arrest. As a lifelong resident of a country known across the globe for crimes against humanity, how is it possible for me to have tiptoed so gently that no cop anywhere, ever, tackled or cuffed me for a ride downtown? My spotless record indicates that I have paused at the threshold of moral opportunity and timidly shrunken myself into something tiny, almost invisible—a green aphid on a tomato leaf, a wisp of smoke from an extinguished match head, a name forgotten in the presence of a long ago face. Our weekly demonstrations at L3Harris have been too small to elicit even a single police cruiser, and even now, none have yet arrived. We live in the new US era of arbitrary arrests. Pristine criminal records have become a luxury of bygone days.

Last week we had seven protesters, and now we shatter that record-breaking turnout with an array of colorful people who number at least four times that many (maybe more)—some wear grim reaper getups, and others are masked, hooded, cloaked, or simply covered over with rain gear and warm coats on a rare, cold, rainy day momentarily punctuating a month of drought and oppressive heat. But these people (organized by Demilitarize Western Mass with a number of individual participants from Jewish Voice for Peace)—however many we have—now block the entrance with their bodies. They have stretched a yellow ribbon labeled, "crime scene" across the road. The crime itself, represented explicitly with a line of faux bloodstained body bags, each the size of an infant, might ordinarily be lost—crimes against humanity depend on the oblivious indifference of participants who work within the lower layers of homicidal supply chains. We stir the faint embers of conscience, the hypothetical internal torment of L3 workers, but we perform primarily to arouse the sleeping giant of Northampton, a city whose moral resolve has been largely illusory.

The L3Harris website might easily be seen as a parody of so-called "woke" culture. One page solicits job applications with a picture of a Black man with a child on his back. Workers at L3Harris have access to "employee resource groups" organized around diverse ethnic, religious, and racial identities. The human imagination would seemingly explode with flabbergasted disbelief at how far absurdity can be stretched—corporations have created cultures with such limitless credulity that George Orwell himself would now scream into the void. At L3Harris you can join "MENA"—a company association for people with Middle Eastern or North African descent who build sensors to guide bombs to the chosen Gazan addresses (schools, hospitals and apartments). I don't see any employees who appear to be Middle Eastern or North African at our Northampton outpost of the death industry. L3 also has an employee resource group called "PRIDE" for its LGBTQ workers. I suspect that we witness a time lag between the old jargon that characterized former US President Joe Biden's style, and the new language of current President Donald Trump's white supremacy. Both Biden and Trump align around L3Harris and massive bombing of civilians. Even the worst crimes against humanity require the balm of cultural trends. Who but god itself could conceivably imagine the roiling thoughts of L3 workers whose cars have been stymied by the accusing souls of dead babies suddenly lined up on the pavement of their employee parking lot entrance.

Ralph Nader sets the Gazan death toll at 400,000 currently—we futilely attempt to replicate the scope of suffering with theatrical props. A stretch of white cloth streaked with more red paint lies across the entire L3Harris driveway entrance, and beside that, puddles of somewhat pinkish liquid glisten in the light mist that falls.

One woman with a bullhorn leads chants: "Hey, ho! L3Harris has got to go! From Palestine to Mexico, L3Harris has got to go!" I team up with a woman in a black raincoat holding my end of a sign that reads, "L3 your boss Chris Kubacik makes $19.8 million a year supplying weapons to Israel." Another companion placard has a photograph of CEO Kubacik blandly smiling to reveal a couple of vampire teeth with a drop of blood oozing at each point. This is all wonderful—any spark of life, whimsy, or celebration these days has an aura of abrupt surprise, as if a spaceship has descended from the void of interstellar darkness and unloaded a cargo of atrophied torsos and oversized heads.

Is L3Harris, the epicenter of Northampton, the only part of Northampton that truly matters, the dusky shadow of ourselves that we paper over with slogans? Our civil disobedience acts out a theatrical production with a skeleton cast. Only the protesters, the police, a reporter for the local progressive newspaper ( The Shoestring), the L3 employees, and a few passing cars are here to play their parts. The two most important roles—the 30,000 Northampton residents and the Northampton elected city officials—are not here. The guidance systems that align bombs with anatomies take shape behind the ordinary walls of a local workplace in a town that thinks of itself as a beacon of universal tolerance. An ocean of blood resolves into a moral trickle. From time to time, activists have assembled at the entrance of L3Harris, but not yet with sustained resolve. We have barely imagined an endgame for resistance, but clearly, we need to release Northampton from the bondage of neoliberal somnolence.

History will possibly link Northampton and L3Harris in the manner that we link Los Alamos, New Mexico and the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People live quietly in Los Alamos too—people who drink coffee and catch their breath, people who look at basketball scores, work as grocery baggers or nuclear physicists, but we forget the normal things that go on at Los Alamos as we may one day forget about Smith College, The Iron Horse Music Hall, or The David Ruggles Center that commemorates the role that Northampton played as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

My comparison between Northampton and Los Alamos might raise eyebrows, as I hope it will. Los Alamos, as a township, had no historical existence at all and rather coalesced around the top secret Manhattan Project begun in 1943. The township officially emerged only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were blown to smithereens—the fruits of Los Alamos. Northampton, on the other hand, has a rich history as one of the birthplaces of the US mental health industry, and as the home of such morally uncompromising religious zealots as Jonathan Edwards and Sylvester Graham. In 1805, 15,000 Northampton residents gathered to celebrate the hanging of two Irish immigrants condemned by a kangaroo court that required no evidence. A few decades later our town became a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Northampton continues to flutter mysteriously in the political breezes. L3Harris did not build Northampton from scratch, but arrived quietly as an afterthought. Most of us don't even know that it is there, manufacturing death and selling lethal components around the globe.

The Manhattan Project was kept secret by design and centered in Los Alamos because of its remote proximity to........

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