What a Horrible Mess

What is that old joke. They told me to cheer up because things could be worse. I cheered up and things did get worse. I have something of that same reaction every time I turn on the news about Japan. What an incredible nightmare is being lived there. The pictures and the stories are like the dollar figures of the national debt, they are so big, so horrible, so complicated that it is hard to get one's mind around them. The historic irony of more nuclear horrors after being the country that endured the atomic bombs. The historic irony of being the most earthquake prepared and ready country on earth. The awesome size of the tsunami which extended its destruction miles pass the warning signs that claim to be the limits of where a tsunami would come.

Perhaps it is an old lesson that we as humans keep needing to learn. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the earthquake in Haiti, the flooding of New Orleans by Katrina, and now this painful suffering in Japan. The hard lesson that none of our imaginations and our technology, none of our human efforts can assure us of protection against the forces of nature. All of our best intelligence and our best construction techniques, all of our projections and forecasts of possibilities are just not able to prepare us for the "worst case" event.

One is reminded of the story of the Tower of Babel where the human spirit wanted to use all its technology, skill and power to build a tower up to Heaven and to summit with the Almighty. The human confidence in its ability to take over and to control creation. They did not make it. And we have not accomplished it. All of the Nuclear Regulations and Authorities who approved the plans for the reactors, all the studies that showed that the reactors could withstand all of the possible calamities that could happen were wrong. Nothing we build, nothing we design, nothing we create will be able to be guaranteed as indestructible. When BP or Exxon tells us their wells are safe, we must always ask them how they are prepared to respond to the failure. When Duke Power requests permits for more Nuclear plants, there will have to be plans made for melt downs and radiation leaks. And when the committee votes to give approval they should have to tell us that they are taking risks; they are taking a gamble and they hope it is worth it.

Robert Bruce, a Scottish poet, reminded a group of us one winter, that the fisherman's prayer is always, "O God, my boat is so small, and Your waves are so big, Be thou my harbor." Our Nuclear Reactors are so small, and the waves are so big, we must never be so confident in our abilities that we think we can withstand the waves. "frail creatures of dust and feeble as frail"