I'm always thrilled, borderline ecstatic, when May Day rolls around. Most years find us gathered around a May Pole, dancing and thrilled to be honoring the reunification of the Lord and Lady in an eternal dance that assures our survival and the fertility of the planet. Most years I take full advantage of the season to find fun and enjoy the sun. It's virtually always a great excuse for a roll in the hay, drinking fermented fluids and enjoying the company of old and new friends, family and the larger community whose members have usually sequestered themselves away during the long dark winter. It is a great time to enjoy the longer days and to sit by a fire during the cool night.
This year I have been having some somber thoughts and serious distractions from the change in season. Oddly enough, this year marked the twenty-fifth annual remembrance of the Chernobyl disaster. It is odd how we can so thoroughly forget things that change the world for both the better and the terribly worse, except on their "anniversary." In many ways we would surely melt down ourselves if we were to keep things like Chernobyl in the mind's eye for too long. Realizing the truth of what went on there and what continues to be reality for millions of suffering individuals makes it difficult to laugh, play and celebrate the season. What I knew about Chernobyl when it blew up was virtually nothing. What I have come to know since then has made me more grown up than I ever wanted to be. News and information about that place and the people of that region have continued to come to me over the years, but this year was strikingly different. I heard a first-hand account of what happened to one young girl who lived near there and how the lives of millions changed in one brief moment.
May Day celebrations were not canceled near Chernobyl after the explosion, even though a cloud of radiation covered hundreds of square miles. Men, women and children wore short sleeves and danced in the streets, staying out in the beautiful weather for hours at the annual festivals and their government knew that they would be exposed to radiation but did not want to alarm them. Cancer rates have increased exponentially since then and the cities for miles around have now been cleared of their populations. Weeks after the release of what later became known as the "black cloud", children were evacuated, leaving all the cities around there childless.What most disturbed me at the time was the utter lack of concern many seemed to have for the people. The United Nations estimates that seven million people are still living with sicknesses and diseases caused by the accident at Chernobyl twenty five years ago. Estimates of the dead are many times higher than that, although records were not kept, except for what they referred to as "liquidators", those who went in after the explosion to "clean up."
Their bodies were buried under lead shielding because they became sources of radiation by just being at the site. A few survive to this day, and are given a paltry sum of twenty dollars each month to help them pay for food. Some of the terrible consequences of that fateful day can be found at: http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
Be prepared for just enough truth to change you for life.
It is time that we all join together to change the direction we are headed. Allowing the nuclear age to continue only assures more accidents and more suffering at the hands of technocrats who seem to want to remain illiterate about the extent and quality of change that radiation poses for our people and our planet. By now, because of the recent events in Japan, we have more than likely heard the term half-life. This is the time period that it takes for the radioactivity in a specific element to be reduced by half. In the case of plutonium, it has a half-life of 24,000 years. If you believe in Christ, that's over ten times as long as it has been since he walked on Earth. That's how long it will take for the radiation to be reduced by half, both from Chernobyl and now, in Japan. There have been other nuclear accidents as well as mistakes that were not treated as accidents, that have resulted in the same sorts of contamination. Just a few sites where problems will outlive our memory of them are at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Of course, Chernobyl, at Rocky Flats, in an area that has been subsumed by Denver, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at several sites in the Desert Southwest here in our own country. We must not forget the purposeful mayhem of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the hundreds, perhaps thousands of sites where we have released radioactive materials without regard for the local populations or showed the slightest concern for documenting our efforts to contaminate them.
It is hard to celebrate this joyous holiday when you feel so terribly that we must change or perish. It seems almost silly to rejoice in the unending fertility of nature at this wonderful celebration of spring, when you know that humanity has come so far along the path to our ultimate destruction.
Perhaps next year, or twenty five years from now, we will be looking back at this time and wondering how our leaders could have been so stupid. My feeling is that we should have done the serious business of shutting these activities down before they ever got started. Science told us what to expect. The lies that humans told about the nuclear age were totally at odds with reality. We all need to work together to get the word out about this dangerous technology. Truth stands up to closer inspection and can stand on it's own. Lies need to be constantly propped up. Learn the truth about nuclear energy and you will never see it the same way again, I guarantee, it will help you to see through a multitude of lies that we have been told for the past fifty years.
This year I have been having some somber thoughts and serious distractions from the change in season. Oddly enough, this year marked the twenty-fifth annual remembrance of the Chernobyl disaster. It is odd how we can so thoroughly forget things that change the world for both the better and the terribly worse, except on their "anniversary." In many ways we would surely melt down ourselves if we were to keep things like Chernobyl in the mind's eye for too long. Realizing the truth of what went on there and what continues to be reality for millions of suffering individuals makes it difficult to laugh, play and celebrate the season. What I knew about Chernobyl when it blew up was virtually nothing. What I have come to know since then has made me more grown up than I ever wanted to be. News and information about that place and the people of that region have continued to come to me over the years, but this year was strikingly different. I heard a first-hand account of what happened to one young girl who lived near there and how the lives of millions changed in one brief moment.
May Day celebrations were not canceled near Chernobyl after the explosion, even though a cloud of radiation covered hundreds of square miles. Men, women and children wore short sleeves and danced in the streets, staying out in the beautiful weather for hours at the annual festivals and their government knew that they would be exposed to radiation but did not want to alarm them. Cancer rates have increased exponentially since then and the cities for miles around have now been cleared of their populations. Weeks after the release of what later became known as the "black cloud", children were evacuated, leaving all the cities around there childless.What most disturbed me at the time was the utter lack of concern many seemed to have for the people. The United Nations estimates that seven million people are still living with sicknesses and diseases caused by the accident at Chernobyl twenty five years ago. Estimates of the dead are many times higher than that, although records were not kept, except for what they referred to as "liquidators", those who went in after the explosion to "clean up."
Their bodies were buried under lead shielding because they became sources of radiation by just being at the site. A few survive to this day, and are given a paltry sum of twenty dollars each month to help them pay for food. Some of the terrible consequences of that fateful day can be found at: http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
Be prepared for just enough truth to change you for life.
It is time that we all join together to change the direction we are headed. Allowing the nuclear age to continue only assures more accidents and more suffering at the hands of technocrats who seem to want to remain illiterate about the extent and quality of change that radiation poses for our people and our planet. By now, because of the recent events in Japan, we have more than likely heard the term half-life. This is the time period that it takes for the radioactivity in a specific element to be reduced by half. In the case of plutonium, it has a half-life of 24,000 years. If you believe in Christ, that's over ten times as long as it has been since he walked on Earth. That's how long it will take for the radiation to be reduced by half, both from Chernobyl and now, in Japan. There have been other nuclear accidents as well as mistakes that were not treated as accidents, that have resulted in the same sorts of contamination. Just a few sites where problems will outlive our memory of them are at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Of course, Chernobyl, at Rocky Flats, in an area that has been subsumed by Denver, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at several sites in the Desert Southwest here in our own country. We must not forget the purposeful mayhem of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the hundreds, perhaps thousands of sites where we have released radioactive materials without regard for the local populations or showed the slightest concern for documenting our efforts to contaminate them.
It is hard to celebrate this joyous holiday when you feel so terribly that we must change or perish. It seems almost silly to rejoice in the unending fertility of nature at this wonderful celebration of spring, when you know that humanity has come so far along the path to our ultimate destruction.
Perhaps next year, or twenty five years from now, we will be looking back at this time and wondering how our leaders could have been so stupid. My feeling is that we should have done the serious business of shutting these activities down before they ever got started. Science told us what to expect. The lies that humans told about the nuclear age were totally at odds with reality. We all need to work together to get the word out about this dangerous technology. Truth stands up to closer inspection and can stand on it's own. Lies need to be constantly propped up. Learn the truth about nuclear energy and you will never see it the same way again, I guarantee, it will help you to see through a multitude of lies that we have been told for the past fifty years.
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