Dear Japan, Dear World
“What you do, you become.”
Dear Japan:
Please don't release radioactive water from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. For the sake of all our underwater kin, and for all of us who live, eat, sail, surf and swim in Her generous waters - just don't. You, among all countries, can heal the world with the way you approach the dilemma that is Fukushima - not with the way you solve the dilemmas of Fukushima (which could also be true) but by how you approach the process of solving them.
These dilemmas are more than logistical puzzles. They are holograms of untreated trauma. Neglected stories. Broken relationships. When these things have been properly tended, the solutions will be so much easier to find and embrace - including the possibility of stepping away from nuclear energy altogether, except as a reminder of its uncontrollable menace.
In the last few centuries, most governments have focused on power and money rather than relationships (except those deemed expedient). This time, instead of making a unilateral decision about a global dilemma, let's try something different: please convene a meeting of all the countries who share the Pacific Rim and ask for help figuring out what to do: what amends need to be made; what grieving must be done, and forgiveness (possibly) offered; what restoration is called for, of all that has been destroyed.
According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, in the Pacific Rim, Thirty countries plus Taiwan operate nuclear power plants, and their reactors generate roughly 10,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel each year. Globally, as of November 9, 2020, there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation in some 30 countries around the world and, according to the Arms Control Association, nine countries possess a total of over 13,000 nuclear warheads. So, you see, Japan, you are not alone, in spite of being the only country that has suffered a nuclear attack. The U.S. isn't alone, either, in spite of being the only country that has perpetrated such an attack.
Between 2004 and 2020, the MacArthur Foundation awarded the Nuclear Threat Initiative $12,295,600. That's a lot of research, and they've been working hard, but there's an insurmountable gap: trauma lives in the body, not in the logical mind, and all of us alive today live under the shadow of nuclear war, pollution and violence. The justifications go by many names: usually it's national security and economic growth, but their common root is trauma, and their drivers are bigotry and greed, and the illusion that might above all will protect us. We have forgotten that the only true safety is mutuality.
I clearly remember, from elementary school, the ubiquitous and rather surreal 'drop drill', when our teachers would suddenly shout, "DROP!" We'd stop whatever we were doing and dive under our little Formica desks, covering our little heads with our spindly little arms, in case the bomb surprised us as it had, without warning, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even then I wondered what sort of derangement could imagine that this would protect us. I came to the inevitable conclusion that we children - and, therefore, the future, were - are expendable. This is still one of the primary existential quandaries we must contend with. Unless we face the whirling propellers of our trauma, we are doomed to re-enact it.
Nuclear reactors, bombs and radioactive waste are global dilemmas, not just because too many millions have already died; not just because future generations have a right to intact genes and healthy lives; not just because sea creatures have a right to thrive (and, in fact, our survival depends on their thriving). Not even because death and pollution do not recognize territorial boundaries, religions, money, or ideologies, but because, in the words of author Machaelle Small Wright, it's time for Behaving As If the God In All life Matters. It's our ticket out of this mess. Our evolutionary next step.
Fukushima is an invitation to make sweeping changes - beautiful, elegant, long-lasting changes. With your leadership, we could set something in motion. To be a global example. And, if we set about our own deeper healing, it will soothe our immune systems and might even help to dispel the pandemic - not as an enemy, but as a ruthless teacher insisting that we stop, listen, and change our ways.
In the words of Lao Tzu, via Ursula K. Le Guin:
The prize thrown away
by the victor is compassion.
The yielder, the griever, the mourner,
keeps the prize. The game is
loser takes all.
Dearest Japan, you hold the unbearable key that could free us to speak the unspeakable. Our gatherings and conversations will need to be carefully arranged. We will require the container of solemn ceremony. We will need to be surrounded by beauty. We will be required to engage with Nature's intelligence. You understand these things. We will also need humility. Openness. Courage. Compassion and trust. The sheer scale of what we must undertake will help us see, together, what we have wrought and who we must become. You can open the way.
Once we begin, people will be drawn in: healing exerts an irresistible magnetic force. Unwinding trauma is hard work - the kind that is not the province of politics or science. It is the heart work that can only be accomplished in community. Please help us begin.
These ways of coming together, these conversations of truth-telling, condolence and amends could create unstoppable momentum. This is the moment to lay down our burdens, or at least help each other to carry them - an intentional tsunami of liberation that would wash us clean and deliver us to a living shore. Who could resist that? Who would want to?
