A lot has been happening lately, and little of it is particularly encouraging. My seeming inability, of late, to formulate blog posts about current events has been a fueled by a combination of laziness and oversaturation. Listening to NPR and reading the news every day makes it feel like there is little new to be said. But, looking back at my blog sometime in the future, I’d like to at least pay homage to this tumultuous period of world history, depressing as it is.
One of the primary reasons the world feels like it’s falling apart is Japan. A 9.0 earthquake there last month triggered a tsunami that decimated the coastline, killed tens of thousands of people, and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The facility has been hovering in various stages of meltdown for weeks, forcing large scale evacuations of the surrounding area and releasing radioactive material into the sea. Sarah, whose opinion I trust on all things nuclear, feels that this disaster will wind up being worse than Chernobyl, most acutely because we simply do not know what exactly is being released into the environment. The common radioactive iodine has a very short half-life, and will dissipate in a matter of days. But if other, more enduring radioactive elements are being released into the sea, they could stick around for decades, wreaking as yet unpredictable havoc on the seafood industry and, more generally, human health.
Domestically, the federal government appears to be on the verge of shutting down. Not only is this bad for the workers who will be, in essence, temporarily unemployed, it is bad for the economy on so many different levels. Federal government contracts are affected. People won’t be getting their paychecks and won’t have as much money to spend. Tourism, especially in a place like DC, is severely hampered. Yet instead of continuing to work on a compromise, as midnight ticks closer, Harry Reid and John Boehner have spent the afternoon squabbling over the source of the impasse. Also, the Republican 2012 presidential primary field looks to be a mix of crazy, crazier, and opportunistic fools that abandon principle pander to the far right. And the long term deficit is going to swallow our country whole if we do not confront it in a mature way, something Obama has, so far, proven unwilling to touch and many Republicans only pretend to care about, by exempting defense spending and revenue generation from the conversation.
One bright spot has been the empowering revolutions across the Middle East. Although it will, unfortunately, prevent me from traveling there for some time, watching the people of Tunisia and Egypt rise up peacefully to demand democracy was heartwarming. It’s fascinating to watch the spread of these movements across the region, and to observe the differing reactions of each regime. Unfortunately, this too has been dragged down, of late, by the violence of Col. Gaddafi in Libya and the resulting Western military intervention. I support the cause, in theory at least, but cannot help feeling wary of getting involved in yet another war. I hope the Obama administration’s rhetoric on this issue proves true, and that the Gaddafi regime collapses soon enough to avoid a long, protracted commitment of US forces there. We really can't afford it, financially, psychologically or, perhaps most importantly, from a national image standpoint in the Middle East.
There is so much that’s good and beautiful in the world, but, at times, I have trouble focusing on it through all of the raucous, worrying trouble that we face.
No comments:
Post a Comment