Sunday Paranoia, Resolved

It was too much, I decided. After all, if everybody on the west coast of North America will have to be evacuated, and they’re not worrying, why should I? Shouldn’t they be writing intemperate, fiery screeds to the Japanese government, demanding that an international team of scientists / experts be given complete control of stabilizing the failed—and melted-down—reactors at Fukushima?

Warning to any readers out there—Fukushima, the nuclear power plant that sustained major damage from the tsunami following the earthquake in April of 2011, seems to evoke two reactions, the first being indifference. And the second? Complete, rampaging paranoia, as you can see in the clip below.

OK, I admit it—I fall into the second camp, since no, I don’t trust the Japanese government in the least to come out and say to the world, “Ooops, sorry, but the situation is completely out of control and we have absolutely no clue about what to do, and so everybody on the West Coast? You’re fucked.”

Well, I justify this by the fact that at least two respected scientists feel the same way: Dr. Helen Caldicott, who revived Physicians for Social Responsibility; and David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, activist, and broadcaster. 

And what do they say?

That we are not just on the edge of the precipice but hanging over the void, with gale winds behind us.

Anything, you see, can happen. The cleanup will take decades to complete—they just covered Chernobyl a month or two ago, and the meltdown occurred in 1986. So Suzuki points out that if there is an earthquake of 7.0 or more, reactor four will collapse, and the amount of radiation released? Here’s one writer:

According to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, there are 1,533 spent and unused fuel rod bundles in the cooling pool that contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

Right—an earthquake is just one unfortunate event. There’s also the fact that the ground around the reactor is saturated, and the building is unstable, and may collapse even without an earthquake.

Then there’s the possibility that the fuel rods, which TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and raise your hands anyone out there who believes those guys know what they’re doing….) is trying to remove, will get dropped, will be jammed into position, will lose their cooling system, will jostle one another and all of that? 14,000 Hiroshimas!

Or maybe a little less, because we also know radioactive water from the plant is spewing into the ocean, so maybe it’s only 13, 999 Hiroshimas! Whew, what a relief.

Oh, and who’s doing all this work? Well, from the same source cited above:

The shortage of qualified workers has been an opportunity for the yakuza. Gangsters have stepped in to supply labor to subcontract to TEPCO's contractors. The yakuza's labor pool is the most desperate men in Japan. They are poorly trained, suffer from wage theft, and are over-worked and demoralized. TEPCO is enabling the yakuza because management is unwilling to cut profits to pay competitive wages.

Guys?

‘It’s too much,’ I think, ‘ so I’ll do what I always do, when I can’t cope anymore and it’s too early to start drinking.’ So I went over to bother Lady, which is permissible since she has been painting houses from the days dinosaurs roamed the earth, and can easily chat and paint.

So we recreate what Harry, my friend who grew up half a century ago in Old San Juan, told me was a typical Sunday afternoon.

“People would sit for hours at a time in each other’s houses, talking, chatting, sometimes just sitting. You would pass by, and they’d just be sitting there in silence. And time seemed to stretch out—the afternoons were infinities. No worries, no anxieties, no rushing around or doing errands. Just sitting with family and old friends….”

Well, yesterday it was a new friend, since Mary Anne, a neighbor of Lady’s and a woman of a certain age, strolled in, bearing frozen yogurt. We smile at each other.

“How can two really important people in my life not know each other,” asks Lady; to a gringo, this is plausible. To a Puerto Rican? Completely crazy.

So now we shake hands, and discover: Mary Anne is a music lover, a painter, a professor.

“Marc is a cellist, and a writer. He plays Bach every day at five in the Poet’s Passage, and gives whatever money people throw into the case to charity.”

“You gotta do it,” I tell Mary Anne, “all cellists have to play an hour of Bach every day.”

“Yeah?” says Lady. You can tell she’s not buying in….

“Absolutely,” I tell her. “It’s like the Spaniards: they have to read a chapter of Don Quixote every day.”

Now she’s really not buying in….

“Well, run over to Spain when you go off to France in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see: all the Spaniards are sitting around reading Don Quixote.

I get a look….

“Anyway, if you don’t play your hour of Bach every day, they don’t let you call yourself a cellist….”

“Yeah?”

“Yup, they take away your license…”

“You got a license?”

“Of course I have a license! Good Lord, Lady, do you know what damage could be done, having a lot of unlicensed cellists buzzing around out there! I’m a board certified cellist, licensed by the American Society of Cellists!”

Nobody believes me, of course, but is that the point? I am waving my mouth as ladies waved their decorative fans a century or so ago: not to much effect but prettily. So a beautiful man strolls in with his four-month old baby—named Abel, and no, I didn’t ask and neither should you—and I have to go talk to him, because who doesn’t like new fathers, especially beautiful ones? And then Naïa strolls in, with her hair looking like one half of a giant dandelion, very much gone to seed.

So Lady goes to deal with that, and I kiss everyone except the one I really, really, want to, and then it’s time to go home.

Oh, and by the way? It’s true about the Spaniards reading a chapter of Don Quixote and how do I know…?

Harry told me!