Tumbling Dice?

The news from Japan just keeps getting worse. For example, the LA Times reports:
A fresh explosion rocked a crippled nuclear complex as rescuers from around the world converged on Japan's devastated earthquake zone, searching for survivors and ministering to the sick and hungry. With the death toll from the largest quake in Japan's recorded history expected to ultimately reach the tens of thousands, more than a half-million people have been displaced by growing radiation fears and the massive swath of destruction.

If all this weren't enough, a volcano erupted in southern Japan.

Further consequences of these disasters--including economic--are apt to be with us for some time, even as we enter the work week after this weekend set of catastrophes. The images alone may well support a apocalyptic mood, while cooler heads cast wary eyes at this and wonder whether it is a global tumbling dice event, the beginning of a radically different world.

But even before any of this began, the hysteria in America among some of the greedy rich as well as the misguided fundamentalists of various persuasions, was evident in the national and state politics of the moment. I am not the only one who suspects that the very extremism of what's going on indicates an extreme level of either misguided or unacknowledged fear.

Some of the misguided fear may well be due to ideology or incorrect analysis. But a lot of it seems to spring from the same unacknowledged causes. Denial and panic are two sides of the same coin. Those who deny the effects of the Climate Crisis, of various other ecological destructions, of the enormous gulf between the very few who are rich and the many who are not, may rail against phantom, crazy causes--health care reform, a commie takeover--but they know we're in very serious trouble. They feel it. And unable to face the actual or at least more likely causes, they panic. Denial is in this case a form of panic.

Some thoughtful people have known for a long time that humanity was going to be mortally tested, even after we apparently kept our heads well enough to avoid thermonuclear annihilation, at least so far. But what we've done to our planet was going to result in a long-term test: were we going to face it and do our best to deal with it, or were we going to deny it and panic? Some of these people--those with more insight into human nature, or who had studied human evolution and ecology--knew that chances are we will deny it and panic, which is what we are doing now, at least in important political ways. It would take humanity to rise above its past to deal with such a set of crises, that could be anticipated but their effects not actually felt by everyone until it was too late. By facing these crises, humanity and human civilization would take a giant step forward.

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan suggest what a future full of disasters with similar effects may be like. We are changing the world's climates, we are poisoning and destroying the oceans, depleting the soil, puncturing the lungs of the planet--the forests. And by denial and panic, by tearing our social cohesion apart with conflict and deep mistrust, by depriving our public institutions of the capacity to respond to crises, we are making it all worse.

We aren't in that future quite yet, at least not so deeply that it changes everything. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. When it does get there (and we wonder if something like what's happened in Japan isn't what sets the dominoes to falling and the dice to tumbling), we will depend on those who have worked hard to face what's coming and develop tools to deal with it. We will depend on people--young people especially--who have learned compassion and courage, tolerance and generosity, and learned to face reality with imagination but without delusion and denial.