A lot can happen in a week. About 1 week ago I was musing over my (what I now refer to as) Napa Valley Meltdown. For those who care, they probably saw that post so know what happened to me on that irrelevantly slow jaunt through wine country.
Wine country. About 45 minutes from here. Here? Davis, CA. A stereotypically small, college town that is both boring and interesting in turns. Davis, CA. Less than a couple of hours from Lake Tahoe. A bit over an hour from San Francisco. The coast. Idyllic place to live. And living we do.
I like to think of myself as a concerned citizen. As a (and I hate the phrase) "global citizen." But of course I'm not really. I can watch the news. Get angry. Maybe contribute some US dollars to this or that. But really, despite my complaints about all the things that make my heart rate accelerate, still reside right here. Safe and sound. And I'm quite happy I am safe am sound. "I" is an encompassing phrase. It means my family, friends, colleagues, and strangers who I see everyday but never will know.
A few weeks back I commented here about the saliency of the Christchurch earthquake to my family, particularly my wife Arlen, who considers ChCh her true New Zealand "home" (she's a Kiwi in case ya don't know). Ironically or perhaps fittingly, one of our best friends, Martin, is coming here Friday. Martin lost about everything in that earthquake. In short, he is NOT safe and sound.
And then last Friday morning, I woke up and saw the headline "8.9 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Japan". I thought, OMFG. One need know only a small bit about logarithmic scales to know that 8.9 is unfathomably comprehensible. It's categorized as a "great quake." The next level is "epic quake"...a level we as humans have never witnessed let alone recorded.
But as far as my mind could imagine destruction on the logarithmic scale, the videos, the images, the sounds, and the words resulted in a mental shutdown. The scale offered by math ceases to matter. Or perhaps it is offscale.
How many dead? Dead in seconds. 10,000? 20,000? Will we know? How many will die? As I write this, there are 50 TRUE heroes...heroes anonymous...working in the nuclear plant losing days, weeks, years of their lives fighting to prevent a nuclear nightmare. Who knows if they will succeed. What if they do not? As I write, they are doing airdrops of water onto the firey furnaces of the melting-down nuclear cores. This strikes me as pissing on a forest fire. This stikes me as something not so hopeful.
But of course I have to have hope. Else I've got to think about what I might be writing this time next week.
And in America, the usual bullshit politics-as-usual persists. This president disappears when he seems most needed (nb: I have and probably will remain a supporter of the President and I think the alternative right-wing nut bags are idiotic opportunists that will jump on any misfortune to knock down the Pres.), dipshit members of Congress liken the nuclear crisis in Japan to a car wreck, and ultimately, American hubris prevails: nothing like THIS could ever happen here. As if we have an unwritten pact with the almighty that OUR ingenuity and OUR "God-given" destiny will preclude such things from happening here. The problem is, it will. And instead of engaging an inevitability, however distant, we pretend that shit like this cannot happen here.
However wrong the following may be, I have been drawn to the following line from the Blue Oyster Cult song [gulp] Godzilla (yes, I know and don't go there): "History points out again and again how nature points out the folly in man."
I don't quote that line flippantly. But it underscores what happens. We know so little about that which is around us. It seems clear to me that assigning probabilities to these sorts of things is, well, mostly folly. In California, we're told there is no chance of an earthquake surpassing the tolerance of the San Onofre nuclear plant. In Japan, they were told similar remarks. In Christchurch, people assumed it was amongst the safest places to reside.
So what is the point here? Fuck. It's a blog. There is no point. I'm just waylaid by what I see happening in Japan. I think about all the Japanese students who I have taught in the ICSPR Program at U of Michigan in the summers. Some simply anonymous students sitting in their chairs. Some who I have written letters of recommendation for for graduate studies in America. In Japan. In Europe.
How are those students? Are any of them now dead? Their families? I feel ashamed I don't remember their names. I mean I met them. Drank beers with them. But I don't really know them.
Citizen of the world?
Not really. A consumer of news. Here. Safe and sound.
Running is irrelevant. I was going to write about that but really, it's irrelevant.
Out
B.
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