"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
attributed to Albert Einstein.
This weekend my dryer decided that it should quit working, which was thoughtful since I hate doing laundry. But it decides to quit by trying to set itself on fire. Luckily, the problem was noticed before the machine caught on fire because apparently the fail safes weren't on duty or had already gone on strike too. But fortunately for me I have a one year warranty for parts and labor. Hero hottie called on Monday, customer service was great and today a service man came out at 7:30 in the morning and fixed it by replacing three different parts.
I have to say I was immensely grateful to have the dryer working as people in my household were starting to complain of needing clean clothes. But of course, a load into drying I'm already having to worry about the dryer, because apparently not everything is fixed and the darn thing is still trying to set itself on fire.
Now, before anyone can accuse me of being insensitive, I should explain what nuclear reactors and dryers have in common. They are both designed by engineers that may or may not know what they are doing, they are put together by people who have bad days, and they can fail.
Fortunately, when my dryer failed, it didn't take out my house. But when a nuclear reactor, (or four, five, six) fails then all hell breaks loose. As countries over the last forty years built more and more nuclear power plants to supply our heavy demand of energy, we were reassured that a nuclear disaster would be a rare event. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were flukes. Somehow if you have two accidents with nuclear devices you can't have more than that. So we kept building more and more, even right on the edge of the ocean and in the path of tsunamis. We built in place where the next door neighbors were major fault lines, and no I'm not picking on Japan, the US has power plants in some unsafe places. Think California.
I was a child of the eighties. Nuclear war, nuclear winter, nuclear disaster, and radiation were all early childhood vocabulary words. When the Chernobyl disaster occurred my parents made me drink powdered milk for months because of the fear of radiated milk.
But Chernobyl was faulty designs and poor engineering and shortcuts taken and that's why it happened or so we're told. Those things don't happen anymore, especially in the US, our reactors are better. Nothing here is poorly designed or designed by engineers that cut their classes to party. I attended an engineering school, and some of my classmates were amazing in their abilities to perform complex equations but there were also the students that cut every class they could. I don't know which ones went on to design high quality, functioning designs and which ones designed things like my dryer or nuclear reactors. And no projects are influenced by the need to make money and lots of it even if shortcuts have to be taken.
Now, we're being told by the Japanese government, by our government, by experts in the nuclear field, that explosions and exposed fuel rods and low levels of radiation aren't all that bad. They'll tell us when to worry, when to be concerned and that even a full meltdown won't effect the entire world. Are these the same groups that told our parents to drop and cover if they were hit by a atomic bomb? Because I'm sure if cowering under a desk was all the protection someone needed from a nuclear bomb then people wouldn't be panicking right now about radiation fallout.
In Tokyo people are fleeing even though radiation levels aren't supposed to be at dangerous levels, yet. Other countries are telling their citizens to leave the area around the reactors and to leave Japan if they don't have to be there. Fear is growing, in Japan, here, around the entire world.
In the States people are starting to wonder if spring is going to come in a radioactive cloud and then there's experts predicting a huge, mega earthquake for the United States. Soon. Maybe even another huge one for Japan.
I can't even imagine the pain and suffering going on in Japan right now. And to watch them deal with it without raping, looting and killing each other is amazing. The rest of the world should take notes from the humanity and dignity they have displayed.
I feel watchful, waiting, holding my breath...hoping. Praying that we slide into spring without anymore disasters, crises, mass destruction. I know it's dark right now, like the harrowing point in the story where we don't know if the hero (or heroine) is going to make it out alive but I have to believe that the end of the story is good.
We can't let fear and anger eclipse love and hope even as we learn that entire villages were wiped off the face of the planet. Sometimes we have to work for the ending we want, and we certainty don't want one of death and destruction handed to us. It just feels despairing as we watch over the last few months; the Australian flood, one of New Zealand's biggest cities nearly destroyed, riots in other countries, Japan broken and shattered, and now a possible world crisis of nuclear meltdown.
I have to believe though. Believe, faith, hope. Strong words for dark days but lesser words wouldn't do right now. Sustain.
Prayers and love. (And give extra hugs to your loved ones.)
