Here I sit in my cluttered work-room, barely keeping up with my accumulations, mostly focused on the stuff I receive out of and put into this screen. I have a good home, good food, good friends, good family, everything is good.
But the following combination of just a few things now is fucking me up:
The Radiation here is coming closer to our children.
I want to accuse The Government, The Corporations, The Media... the entire shit-stem.
After Tunisia, Egypt and the general wave of spreading good-feeling revolution I glean from the web, Libya is not following suit so easily, and the US jumps in with a display of might, participating in and encouraging more killing, while Our Leader is in Brazil pushing warplanes.
Haiti, already poverty-stricken and exploited from within and without, and nowhere near back on its feet after last year's earthquake, is in the middle of a cholera epidemic. Thousands of people have been dying from an easily treated disease.
I didn't even know anything about the situation in Haiti until a few days ago, after the current mess started here in Japan. It was off my radar, or maybe it was something I might have noticed but already had so much to process for it to stick.
In any case, what strikes me now: material wealth, popularity, connectedness and such make all the difference. Japan will be back on its feet soon enough. We have plenty of support, and plenty of resilience. What little poverty there is here is well hidden.
But we are guinea pigs. Now the effects of radiation pollution on a dense populace are finally going to be studied, and hopefully, acted on.
I cannot imagine life in Haiti as I have never been there, or in any other poor country. I have always lived in a world where it is customary to waste things in everyday life and hurry onward. It is a good life, and I feel thankful for it and try not to respond to or act out of the simple guilty feeling of having too much. But still it's all fucking me up.
