Atomic monkeys are dangerous
By Scott Parkinson

There was recently a debate in Tacoma, Washington, on whether or not they would accept the nuclear waste from other areas of the world. This seems like a very clear-cut debate‹ "No, Mr. Man we don't want your waste. Thank you very much for considering us, but what you want to give us is poison and we don't think that we need any more than we already have." End of debate. And that is pretty much how it went.

The news coverage of the episode explained that Tacoma was one of a couple of cities that were on some government list as prospective cities to accept the waste. Upon hearing that their city was on this list of dubious distinction, the people of Tacoma, having been notified by the Port-of-Tacoma (which was the reason they were on the list in the first place), got agitated, and this was understandable. Nuclear waste is notorious for coming up with new ways to escape from its supposedly permanent incarceration‹a super-con that can exploit its jailers' weaknesses on an atomic level with infinite patience, and once free it becomes an invisible stalker striking at the very core of our beings. It would be like having your neighborhood used to house every horror show psycho-killer, while you knew it was just a matter of time before they got free and began their rampages of terror, probably while you were asleep and unsuspecting. Not a pleasant thought. So, upon hearing about the plans being made for their city, the citizens of Tacoma rallied.

In what is a marvel in this day of social apathy, the people of Tacoma, coupled with the Port-of-Tacoma, formed groups, held rallies, staged protests and generally made noise. They caused a stink. They went to meetings that were being held on all levels and made it clear that if Tacoma remained on the list of ill repute, then the people of Tacoma would really get riled. A ruckus, a hubbub, a hullabaloo, and worse were all implied when they told the Great Forces of National Direction that they did not want to house this killer, and so stern were their words and so sincere were their hearts that people sat up and listened. Ohhh, they thought, this does seem troublesome. Nuclear waste is already such an unstable matter that it doesn't seem wise to mix it with the unstable air that seems to be brewing around Tacoma. The Great Forces of National Direction had learned that the combination of these two unstable and easily agitated quantities can at the very least cause tremendous headaches for them and this is to be avoided at all costs.

Hurrah... Hurrah, for the people of Tacoma. Goliath saw your spinning sling, and having been clunked on the bean by that rock before, decided that you were too wary a foe and left you alone. Congratulations David, the threat of your headache drove the giant from your doors and with him goes his poisonous garbage. Or so it seems.

The decision is not final yet, but all the official reporters and official officials seem to concur on Tacoma's victory. Goliath, while being a giant of gigantic proportions, appears to be quite a coward at heart. He likes to intimidate through his size and a few token shows of force. He's learned from a couple of solid ass-whippins in the past, that a really worked up little-man who holds firm and uses every gadget, gidget, widget, and doohickey that he can lay hands on, is a really annoying opponent. It's not that Goliath couldn't win if he really applied himself to the fight, but why should he if he can find someone to do his bidding without all the fuss, someone who immediately backs down in deference to his proportions. And that is exactly what everybody expects him to do. Why else would he make up a list of possible candidates for his garbage if not to sound out his opponents and find the easiest one?

So, congratulations Tacoma, whenever the decision comes, I'm sure it will not be you that takes the waste. Your reaction appears to have been violent enough to keep you safe. You bonded together in civil unity to form a greater good for your people and that is to be commended. Good-bye Goliath, good-bye poison‹so long, sayonara, chow, and hasta la bye-bye baby.

Tacoma's reaction could be a model for other cities on how to mobilize against unwanted inconveniences, especially to the poor city that ends up taking the waste. It is almost assured that the city that gets it doesn't want it, but that they just didn't know how not to take it. "No, no, really you shouldn't have. We are so unworthy. Please, give it to someone more deserving that us, someone that has done something to warrant this gift. Ohhh, nobody is more deserving of this than we are? Really? Nobody's done something that makes them more responsible for this than we are? Ohh, OK, if you're sure we're as responsible for this as everyone else, we'll take it." And so you have it‹not your problem anymore, Tacoma, you've won. Or so it seems.

At least, it isn't your problem if you continue to look at it from the view of Tacomanians verses all other people. Where you draw the lines defines who won this battle, as it does with all battles. You see, as the people of Tacoma they won't have nuclear waste shipped into their city, but as US citizens they will still be having nuclear waste shipped into their cities, and as world citizens they will still have nuclear waste piling up in little hot-spots wherever local citizens were not strong enough to stop the regional Goliath from dumping it on them. The lines are what worry me, not the fight. The fight was good. It recognized the harm and destruction that are latent within nuclear waste and then sought a way to combat the threat that it posed. Unfortunately, I don't think the fight did what people intended for it to do‹that is to remove the threat of being poisoned by our own waste.

Nuclear waste is just as notorious for not caring about arbitrary human lines as it is notorious for its other nasty habits. That's the problem with the stuff, every conventional way we have developed for dealing with our problems does not seem to deal with the problems that arise from nuclear waste. In fact, nothing we seem to figure appears to have any real affect on containing the problems that we continue to create by not containing our need to continue to create nuclear waste. So, Tacoma's not-in-my-backyard approach just won't be of any real help when the atomic-shit hits the fan. Sure, it might buy them a little time, but is that the extent of result they wanted from all of their hard and earnest effort, a little time. I don't think so.

The people of Tacoma fell into a trap that is as old as the human mind, and that is the trap of parochial thinking. When the people in the Tacoma area heard that the waste might come to their town, then they thought that as the people of Tacoma we must stop this immediately. Get rid of it, send it somewhere else‹a good, conventional remedy that has worked for centuries, if not longer. The problem is that since the dawn of the atomic age that remedy, so tried and true, has ceased to be a path of escape from our new problems. Where do you send something that can leach into the ground and pollute the water or spew into the sky and taint the air. No hole goes deep enough to escape from being in the earth and though the atmosphere does cease at one point its getting things beyond the end of the sky that remains problematic. This being the case, we must stop thinking about this as a regional problem and recognize it for the universal threat that it is and try to approach it on a broader level.

E.B. White, a great man and a true friend of nature, both human and organic, noted in Sootfall and Fallout that the greatest tragedy of the Second World War was not the great waste of human life, which saddened him incredibly, but rather after that enormous waste nothing was learned from it. He saw different lines being drawn that represented the same things as the lines that had caused the war in the first place. He also surmised, correctly I believe, that the UN was not going to be an instrument to lead humanity into a new era of group identity, but rather just a way of formalizing the old order into a new, snappier form. The oft repeated mistakes of man where not being recognized, only reformulated. Instead of Germany against France, it would be the US. against the U.S.S.R., but this time with some really big guns--guns that could end it all for everyone. E.B.'s fear was that whatever it was that we stumbled upon we would not grow mature fast enough to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Well, it's been about four decades since E.B. first began to wonder about what we've done and were it will take us, and I'm sad to report that we're on the same dead-end path as before, only now we really have a head of steam up. We're still viewing the world in a series of boundaries, some pre-human trait to mark our territory so that others will not intrude upon it, only now we use intellectually-reasoned lines of demarcation rather that urine and scent. The only problem is that our intellect has raced ahead of our instincts and has created problems that our old behavior only complicates. We are being pulled apart by our fascination with what our clever minds can create and how our retroactive personalities allow us to use our new gadgets. The bigger, stronger, faster inventions of the future seem to be deadly toys in the hands of the apes of the past and until we can learn to use them without danger, to ourselves as well as the rest of the planet, maybe we should stop playing with them and go back intellectually to where we dwell emotionally‹sharp sticks and shiny rocks.

Scott Parkinson stews and spews in Seattle (at the moment).

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