nukeyland

Hello everybody! I'm from Nukeyland. For almost the entirety of my first eighteen years, i lived in a newly developed (mid 60's) neighborhood of Richland, Washington, shadowed by the Hanford nuclear power plant. Mostly a town of government A-frames from the 40's and 50's, growing up, names like Nader always had four letters. Funny that. Nice, hard working people; it's just that when you follow the money, we pretty much all lined up politically conservative.

College, in Ohio, was my first exposure to some of the absurdities that had thus far marked my life. Someone gave me a Nukeyland t-shirt (picture a glowing yellow Mickey Mouse with a gas mask over his face). I read, in a national magazine, of the ongoing controversy about my high school mascot: a mushroom cloud. I shit you not. What? Wasn't everyone proud that we were the first nation to develop, test and use atomic weapons? Apparently, Richland had a lot to do with that. I now shudder with shame.

Click the title of this post to see a sound article by Dr. Helen Caldicott. Makes me wonder what kind of propaganda is being sold today in the land of my youth. When the blowback she describes occurs, that will indeed be the chickens coming home to roost for all the plutonium we've dumped on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Japan. Her nightmares have become mine.

On a related note, to see just what lives after disasters such as this, click here and from there click on the link that begins with, "This is a story about a town..." It's an amazing, Romero-esque, 42 chapter photo essay. Buckle in for a ride through Chernobyl.


Update 2 July: I found this (home sweet home) on Znet.