The empire strikes forward: America is trying to take over the world, and no one can stop us except us

These last two weeks have seen some minor headlines over the Bush Administration's decision to renege on a Dubya campaign pledge and sign off on a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. For me, they've been bittersweet, bringing back memories of both empowering protests and lost opportunity. I was among the handful of folks involved in a late 1985 “encampment" (read: borrowed mobile home), sponsored by a church group out of Southern California, that was the first of what became a nearly decade-long wave of massive protests at the Nevada Test Site.
I came with a half dozen or so folks from Houston; there were others, from California, Utah, the Pacific Northwest, and points beyond, and within a year or so, the remote desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas was home to some of the largest civil disobediences in recent times. (I even spent some time early on in the jails in Beatty and Tonopah, before the numbers got too large for Nye County to cope.)