Notice anything odd? Look at the headlines on the major news sites. Look at the Daily Kos Rec List. You can't prove by any of them that less than a week ago tens of thousands of people lost their lives. Worse, you can't tell that many, many more are (right now as you're reading this) homeless, hungry, cold and psychologically traumatized beyond comprehension.
Maybe it's just human nature that we're both fascinated by the invisible monsters that might attack us, like radiation, and quickly overwhelmed to the point of numbness when actual catastrophes are too big to even imagine. Maybe ...
As odd as it may at first seem, I see similarities in our fascination with praying and in nuclear disasters. We never really seem to question the mechanics; you know, how does it actually work? Or not work? I mean, really, what do you think will happen if the cores of all 6 Fukushima reactors melt down? Certainly nothing good ..., but how bad? And over how wide an area? What is your "mental model" for how things will unfold and what is that based upon?
It's kind of like prayers in that, in general, people don't know exactly how they work either and they never keep accurate mental accounts of the details. People just have some vague notion of it all—unexplored beliefs about how best to do it; when and where—and even more vague ideas about the mechanics of it. I can never figure out why, if people truly believed prayer works, there isn't a huge organization of good prayers (that is, people with excellent prayers-said-to-prayers-answered ratios) kept constantly on their knees (or however it works best) repeating something like, "Please, God, don't do any really bad shit to us today," over and over. I mean, if prayers really worked, why are they almost always reactionary instead of preemptive?
Did you know that, as best as anyone can figure, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl—the nuclear disaster by which all others are measured—resulted in about 4,000 deaths (50 as a direct result of the explosion and about 4,000 more due to radiation induced cancers)? Note, please, that I didn't say only 4,000. 4,000 is a lot of death—a whole lot of futures rendered impossible. But that's less than half the number of deaths in just one of the seaside port towns (Minamisanriku) that were devastated by the tsunami. Did you also know that many of those 4,000 cancer deaths were easily preventable had the authorities just taken the necessary steps to monitor the spread of radiation in the food chain and stopped it wherever it showed up?
And did you know that the probability of more than 4,000 people dying from exposure and disease within the next few weeks in the tsunami affected areas of Japan is far greater than 4,000 ever dying as a direct or indirect result of a complete, uncontrolled meltdown at Fukushima? So why the fascination? Is it just because radiation is a perfect example of the "invisible monsters" evolution has left us hyper-sensitive to? Is it simply because mainstream media—a monster of the not-invisible-enough sort—is controlling which topics we get fed for our collectively pondering?
Or could it be because it's human nature to find more entertainment value in talking about disasters that might happen than about those that are pretty much a fait accompli? Good god, I pray that's not the case (or at least I would if I thought it might actually help) ... But the fact remains that we've been live-blogging a "nuclear disaster" for more than three days here (even though it's actually only been a potential disaster during this time, one that will, should it occur, be orders of magnitude less of one than what happened on March 11th). And the real (still current, still unfolding, ...) disaster? It hasn't made the Rec List for at least the past 2 days.
I don't suppose we can blame MSM for that.
Speaking for myself, I know I seem to hit a point with these big disasters at which my brain just sort of turns the emotional volume down. It's almost as if all the energy I had available got used up in a manic quest to gather information (followed, of course, by the seemingly obligatory and equally manic quest to share that information). Maybe you're familiar with that feeling (non-feeling?) you get after a few days of watching and reading the news where you just can't quite seem to care as much as the day before? It's not that you don't want to; it's like somebody took the OMG!!! out of it and all that's left are the mundanities like cleaning up and burying a bunch of people you actually didn't know anyways ...
But that can't be it. Maybe it's because when you're talking about potential nuclear disasters, unlike natural disasters nobody could do anything about, you feel like there's something that can be done. You know, that somehow all this trying to keep up with what's happening and all this commenting here and elsewhere about what just happened and what you think might have just happened and what that means (or at least what you think it might mean) ... that somehow all that will lead to something changing.
And I guess I can't help but look at that and think it's not much more effective than praying. Which isn't to say that it's completely pointless. I mean even unanswered prayers are useful to the extent that the person saying them has managed to think through what he or she wants to see happen enough to at least put that into words. And that's not a bad first step. But I got to tell you, a freezing man is going to favor the person offering a blanket to share over the one who can tell him how blankets should be made. And the hungry man will benefit more from the guy offering food than from the one who wants to swap recipes. And who in Japan really cares if I stay up till 2 in the morning talking about any of this ...
I think, really, that I'm a bit pissed off at, and disappointed in, myself. Maybe you can understand ... I wanted to do something of worth; I wanted to do something that mattered to these people who have had so much taken away so painfully, and instead I've been mesmerized into a stupor one more time by the information machines.
I haven't made any difference at all and I'm right on the verge of letting the opportunity slip away so I can get on to the next topic de jour.