Exactly twenty-five years ago today a rather remote nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine – at that time still in the Soviet Union – exploded and sent a deadly dose of radioactivity into the atmosphere where it eventually spread out over the skies of neighbouring Belarus, in particular, but soon over much of northern and central Europe as well. At first the Soviet government denied that there was a serious problem and sent in men on suicide missions with shovels and fire hoses to supposedly cover up a potential danger which in fact was already completely out of the bottle. The results are now there for all to contemplate. One third (!) of the soil of Belarus is contaminated, a substantial zone around Chernobyl is uninhabitable and will remain so for centuries, and scores of thousands have died.
And now in far-of and technologically sophisticated Japan, something similar is going on. The government greatly understated the danger, courageous men were sent in, certainly better protected than the fireman of Chernobyl but still in mortal danger, but the evil genie was already out of the bottle, the ocean itself is contaminated and 80,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. There is no guarantee that they will ever be allowed to return. And this time there has been some reflection on what it means since it is very unlikely that the next catastrophe will need another twenty-five years. Germany has shut down, at least temporarily, its oldest reactors and is considering a future without nuclear power, with no easy solution once one has become addicted to it. But resource-poor France, and increasingly India and China, have made clear that they are putting all their energy bets on nuclear power and even poor Belarus is building its first nuclear reactor right on the Lithuanian, and EU, border. So much for learning from the past.
Archives for April 2011
The Strange Disconnect of the Tea Party
Much of the attraction of the Tea Party to Americans has been its avowed commitment to downsizing the government and limiting government’s influence on our lives and the Republican Party has been pleased to play to this mythic tribute to the so-called stubborn independence of Americans.
Recently the woman who calls herself the leader of the Massachusetts Tea Party was on TV demanding the elimination of federal support for PBS because – and I could not make this up – Sesame Street was such a left leaning – possibly Communist show. Her immediate example was that first lady Michelle Obama had been on the show promoting more broccoli rather than cookies for the health of child followers of Cookie Monster. So here was an incidence in her mind of an intrusive government forcing children to consider broccoli over cookies. (The irony that the Tea Party woman was quite fat and could have done with more broccoli and fewer cookies did not enter her limited mindscape.)
But while they claim to want freedom from government intrusion in their lives, Tea Partiers and their Republican soul mates are nonetheless committed to a strong and intrusive government role in limiting the rights of others, including gay Americans’ rights to serve in the military and to marry; women pregnant from rape or incest’s rights to choose abortion; artists’ rights to express non-conformist views of Christianity; Muslims’ rights to build cultural centers in their chosen locations; and American women’s right to ready access to birth control information and resources.
The Tea Party is in reality a loose confederation of people intent on telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do in our personal lives and committed to a government bent on forcing their narrow-minded social agenda on the rest of us.