Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Piper

Little One has had a sheltered childhood: he has been spared images of falling towers, flooded New Orleans and tsunami-ravaged India. But he is slowly awakening from his reverie, as images of jackknifed trains and obliterated towns and exploding reactors flood our lives this week. It seems fitting that his class is studying Norse Mythology; they have reveled in the great trickster Loki and the power of being godlike, and have just arrived at the fall of the gods.

Dinner table conversation was interesting last night: the sausage was tasty (a local, smoke bratwurst), so much so that both boys asked why I couldn't make twice as much so they could have two each. I was just launching into my "do you know how many resources go into meat production" tirade when Darling Hubs jumped in, reminding them that we just ordered an electric car, and asking if we are carbon neutral yet? I pointed out that even though we purchase green energy and offsets, we're not, since we continue to heat with natural gas. But we do much better than average.

Once the conversation bounced to the nuclear plant situation in Japan, Little One, who had been watching intently with a furrowed brow, finally chimed in. He's trying to understand the big deal with nuclear energy. When we give him a simple explanation that it generates electricity using radioactive materials, his eyes widen at the word, and he says, "Radioactivity?! Don't they know that's dangerous? Why would they do that?"

I am a child of the nuclear age, ducking and covering under my desk during earthquake and nuclear drills: my father actually designed and supervised the building of part of a nuclear power plant, and both he and I voted to mothball it very few years later. Darling Husband can proudly say he marched against the nuclear plants placed along the Rhine. And we held on to each other through a frightening spring of misinformation when the cloud from Chernobyl was passing over our heads even as our governments said it wasn't.

But in the end, we must, as they say, pay the piper. There is a price for convenience--for flipping a switch and having it there, for leaving lights burning in an empty room, on an empty street, or an empty sports field. We are happy to abdicate the details to someone else, let "them" think about it. But "they" are us: we are complacent and complicit. Those who squeak warnings are squelched and silenced, and sidelined, but we would be wise to listen and wiser still to join in the chorus. Little One is being taught the lesson in school, but we adults fail to embody it. Those arrogant Norse gods thought themselves invincible, and fell. We would do well to remember.