A Jinn Out of the Bottle

Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

Round Lake still has ice, April 1st.  Ice out is way late this year.

Put Kate on the Northstar this morning, headed for MSP, terminal 2, for her Southwest flight to Denver and granddaughter Ruth’s 5th birthday.  Kate gets a real kick out of visiting the grandkids, a sort of grandma thing.  It’s great to see.  Being retired makes all this much easier for her.

Fukushima nuclear disaster appears to grow worse though sorting out the news reports is difficult.  The utility company appears less than forthcoming with data and the Japanese government has been unusually slow, too.  As Bill Schmidt said at Sheepshead, the tsunami and the earthquake have created much greater human tragedy so far.  Over 10,000 dead found and probably and equal number sucked out to sea never to be found.

Those folks need our attention and our care, as do humans experiencing disasters natural or manmade anywhere.

And yet, the media focuses on the nuclear story.   This is a genie that we know, one loosed from its billions of years old bottle, a source of energy confined to the bright heart of stars until the last century.   We say we control it, but like fire, if it gets away from us, its elemental nature can overwhelm our defenses, poison our world.  The record is mostly good, consider all those reactors functioning all these years without an accident, but three, three acknowledged accidents, roils the psyche.  What have we done?  Could such an unusual confluence of events happen here or over there, or over there?

This is a story whose end is not yet written, one whose significance will become clear later, perhaps years, maybe even centuries from now.