Sunday, May 26, 2013

Thoughts from Readers

I am very frustrated by the lack of collective response to Fukushima. If the plant is lost in flames then we will see nuclear dominoes fall in an unprecedented nuclear extinction event. Yet it seems as if no one is doing anything or paying attention to the most pressing crisis humanity has ever confronted (in written history, at least).

Many of my readers have similar feelings.
 
After fighting for a year and a half to bring Fukushima to more public attention, I am deeply pessimistic, or more probably, disillusioned. I shudder to think of the future, especially Japan's, then ours and everyone else's. But I became convinced one day that humanity would survive, albeit in a new world, one perhaps not so much to our liking. It will perhaps be a new world in which such concepts as interdependence and caring for others have a more visceral meaning, in which spiritual values are not a matter of choice. The Golden Age may not be what we envision.
But the return of Love is certain.


GaylaMay 24, 2013 at 8:35 PM
When I became aware that Fukushima has strong potential to make the entire Earth uninhabitable with the next big earthquake in Japan -- and when I saw that almost nobody was willing to look at the situation -- I knew we had no chance. With media and government collusion, Fukushima doesn't exist for most people. If people can't get motivated to look at reality and work together when Earth is threatened with destruction at any minute -- if they prefer not to know -- what hope can there be? Watching media and government lie, downplay, and ignore Fukushima has been instructive about the priorities of those who run the world -- get as much out of us for as long as possible and above all don't let us know we're on the way out.


I discovered Enenews via Washington's blog during the BP Gulf disaster: the image of someone with gaping wounds bleeding in the kitchen while the dinner party chattered on was excruciating - then came the explosions at Daiichi and the image of a demonic infected wound seeping & spewing for eternity... and the stupid dinner party continued! I was going quietly crazy at Christmas 2011, when finally in early 2012 Sen. Wyden went to Fukushima and started calling for "an international response" so we mobilized to support his initiative, to no avail...

5/22/13, the policy of dumping contaminated water into the amniotic fluid of all life, the ocean, was quietly adopted (all the earlier press & discussion was just a PR ploy to frame the imminent policy, and anyway: it's been leaking into the Pacific since day one

yes, the inevitable will happen! we don't deserve this gem of a planet, but that will soon be moot point - Cecile Pineda, author of 'Devil's Tango' has paraphrased Einstein: "Repeatedly expecting a sane response from those who are insane is an exercise in madness" http://devilstangobook.blogspot.com/

bottomline, for the time that remains: be kind to all living beings

trust is traction, and I trust Peter Dale Scott who ends an important recent essay http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3933:

"In terms of logical analysis, the likely prospect would seem to be the pessimistic one. But neither humans nor their history are wholly logical....
"So it is from faith, rather than from logic, that I am committed to the optimistic prospect. I do so because of the rewards offered by that truth which, as Gandhi wrote, “is like a birth.”

"And I do so from faith, because, to quote Gandhi yet again, “Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs matchless and pure strength of faith.”

and so I'm going out today to tag Monsanto as the evil spawn of the corporate death wish that it is, because I have heard the call: life is sacred and our place in it almost over, so there is no longer any reason or permission to temper the truth with dinner party etiquette
mitakuye oyasin!

Some readers, such as Stock and Craig, suggest a pragmatic approach to handling this grief:

My plan for several years was to "at least" get to a sustainable, defensible domicile. It does seem that things are still trending the "wrong way" and no one wants to take their medicine.

Prepare for the future, for you and your family. And as extra energy, resources, and money allows, help others to see the need to prepare and to change the existing corruption standard. And to kill nuke, always a good goal. 2 down, 102 to go.


Craig
* Fukushima Daiichi's Tepco is, of course, a symptom of how badly civilization muddles along, identifies authority, concedes prerogatives of ownership, and selects its leadership (our "deciders", as GW put it). Not   only on account of poisoning our oceanic food chain, from the plankton on  up, but for a host of dreadful, capitalism and over-population driven reasons, it's time to get real about managing our prospects.

The point of doing so, as always, is to optimize what we might of our circumstances, and to best cope with the rest.

* Let's keep this personally precious present of ours in perspective.

    ~ Even in a perfected world community, we'll all pass away as individuals, so what we're concerned with is conserving what's worthwhile from our heritage and contributions --if not as part of a cultural continuum, then at least with our best efforts to bridge it into a hoped for future (however distant).

    ~ And this will certainly not be the first time humanity has bridged over the darkness, from one empire and era to the next.

* While bearing witness to the catastrophes which loom ahead is certainly our duty, let's not lose a bunch of time and effort in waiting for the bulk of society to figure it out. The general populace can absorb terrible conditions, morbidity and death --while their leadership minimizes, covers up and denies "inconvenient truths". By the time consequences, scourges and awareness reach the "deciders" and opinion makers, we'd have allowed valuable opportunities to escape our grasp. The time is now --to round up, secure and bridge what treasure and communion might be passed forward.

* But however late the hour, let us neither be stressed. Our culture, without our special efforts, is unlikely to be totally lost --given all the durable detritus we're leaving behind, plus the many mementos we've buried and launched into space.
> http://davidszondy.com/future/timecapsule/voyager.htm

What we can add to that, individually and collectively, are "warm" things:  greetings, heart felt apologies, encouragement for our inheritor's  struggles, and our personal "neediness" --to be taken in, to be held and kept in living memory. Such spiritual hunger is an empowering gift.

* We could get lucky.

A visible, concrete, time capsuling effort is likely to capture the  attention of interested others. There's an outside chance of a fashionable "VIP" or influential group taking notice, and when it comes to fashion, the world can "turn on a dime". A popular celebrity, saying the right words at the right time, especially given the considerable existing discontent and
skepticism about government, corporations corruption and lies in general --could initiate a tidal wave of change.

* And yes: whatever comes, there'll very likely be survivors, an eventual recovery, and one that's a lot less energy happy (since we'll have used up most of the fossil fuel --*urp*). The biosphere extends miles down into the Earth and has come back after gawdawful "extinction events". Even though people haven't been around for very long, we've already managed to survive asteroid hits, years of endless winter, ice ages, many (humanly long) periods of cosmic radiation bombardment, the "dark ages", and tyrants without end.
Craig 


Majia here: I'm privileged to have such thoughtful readers.
 

1 comment:

  1. thank you Majia, for prompting these comments and collating them for us - I am heartened by the sincerity & reverent intelligence of those who responded, and my perception of our predicament has grown broader and hopefully more effective as a result: thank you all

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