My heart goes out to the people of Japan. The earthquake has caused suffering on an unprecedented scale. I cannot imagine the horror of being there right now, of dealing with this situation as I type these words from the back patio of a beautiful home in sunny, placid Los Angeles, though I realize that “disaster” can happen here, too, at any time and without warning.
But by the word “disaster” I do not mean the earthquake itself. An earthquake is NOT a disaster: is is an earthquake. It is what it is, the shifting and crunching of tectonic plates. The effect it has on human peoples is disastrous, but the earthquake taken objectively is no disaster.
This is no matter of semantics. I’m using this earthquake as an example of how we allow language to distort nature, to color our views of natural events. By referring to the earthquake itself as a disaster, the media reveals our species’ insipid belief that we are somehow the masters of nature and not the other way around.
If the earthquake IS a disaster, it is only one because shifting environmental patterns caused by human behavior made it so. I suspect that there is some truth in this, but I am not a scientist and can’t say for sure. If, however, our actions did not contribute to this earthquake, then the quake simply is and it’s how we respond to it that matters.
As a species, we don’t like this. We don’t like to view the world from an objective distance. He slap humanistic labels on everything. By calling the earthquake a “disaster,” we attempt to give it form that it does not have. The fallout from the earthquake – our unpreparedness, our own refusal to see how the earth really operates, how it really is – are the real disasters here. Since words are frequently taken the wrong way as they are filtered through one mind or another, I want to stress again that I do believe the aftermath of the earthquake – its affect on people – is a disaster.
The issues with nuclear plants and all the radioactivity spewing into the sky is most definitely a disaster as it is entirely human made, and what is human made is also human-preventable.
Just because the world has been sold a bill of goods that nuclear energy is safe (even “liberals” have bought this line) does not make it so. We are messing around with an antique physics we don’t even fully understand and leaving generations the terrible issue of dealing with spent radioactive waste.
Beyond this, the plants themselves are poorly built, subject to the profit motive and the price of stocks in the energy giants that build these terrible machines. ABC News just reported on two General Electric scientists who “resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing — the Mark 1 — was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.”
They were right, but no one cared.
That these plants got built this way is human hubris to the extreme, and hubris will be our undoing if we don’t get a grip on our selfish behavior and find real ways – sustainable ways – to operate our society. This may mean learning to live with less gadgets, electronics, cars, and planes. Surely, this can be done. We got along fine without these thigns for 1000s of years. And it may mean scrapping traditional physics for something entirely new, something that perhaps someone now is working on but who will be – or was already – silenced by energy companies for rocking the boat.
Nikola Tesla, Wilhelm Reich, and countless others who are now anonymous saw other possibilities for creating limitless and free energy for all mankind. They are brave enough to seek new ways of understanding the universe and how to tap into its unlimited metaphysical potential. The universe contains limitless energy. We just jhave to learn how to plug in a tap and let it flow. Smashing atoms is not such a tap. Do not be fooled.
Negatives can be turned into a positive and while the lives of those affected by the earthquake in Japan may never be the same – many are surely ruined – we might use this as an opportunity to explore new avenues, new ways of looking at the world divorced from ego, self interest, profit, and hubris.
Only by seeing things as they are - by seeing an earthquake as an earthquake and not as a disaster – can we ever hope to move ahead and continue our journey on earth.
