Lately, I’ve noticed the silence around a growing cataclysm — the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. There’s a China syndrome, ongoing, that threatens the entire Pacific Ocean and could also result in a radiation release equal to 15,000 Hiroshima bombs.
And we’re arguing over Obamacare!
It’s tempting to blame our lack of awareness of such an event on the abysmal news media. Imagine if Walter Cronkite had somehow never mentioned the Vietnam War. Now, with the passage of Japan’s new state secrets law, designed to silence criticism of the government and the country’s failed power plant, it’s a fairly safe bet that if the worst comes, we — the little people — will be the last to know. Not that there’s much we could do if we did know, I suppose, other than telling our children to crawl under their desks or deciding to invest in space colonization.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everyone is aware of what’s happening, but they’re choosing to look the other way. Well, why not? We’re already overwhelmed. Record numbers of us are broke, out of work, or just struggling to hang on. Some 50 million Americans are going hungry, and one in five are children. Not many people are looking at that, either — except for those it’s happening to, of course.
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