The Evil that Men Do.....

Sometimes politics is geographic and not just philosophic. When the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl failed and clouds of poisonous pellets poisoned the air and water around the Cancer Zone that was ground zero, my family (which in those days was my wife and son) and I lived in Offenbach, West Germany.

A story that was page one on this side of the Atlantic when it happened and then slid below the fold and then to an inside page in a matter of days, was a front page fixture for weeks at a time in our newspapers. Patrick and his friends were kept away from the sandboxes in the public parks because, well, you just didn't know and I followed with a morbid fascination the end of life stories of very brave, but ill-equipped, people who had hoped to stop a calamity that overtook and consumed them.

I confess to having nearly forgotten about it, all of it even while hoping the world as an abstract would never so do. Last Sunday evening "60 Minutes" reminded all of us again what happens when we play God and when we fail.

There will come soft rains falling forever on the streets of Pripyat and elsewhere until everything we know is just swept away and we remain, naked and heedless of the lessons life tried to teach us.
-bill kenny