Lots of new EPA data is up today...

oh sweet candycorn bejeezus. rofl.

you can believe what you want, your shallow dopey criticisms don't even merit a response. your drunken strawmen are worthless, your "plain brownpaper bag" conclusions painful to witness.

who let the dog out, who who

oh sweet candycorn bejeezus!

you are all over the map as far as credibility goes. i'll do my best to ignore your illogical, eccentric and ramped-up ramblings from now on. you don't understand anything beyond your own self-induced mediocrity, comical justifications and fractured ego.

who let the dog out, who who

If that is true of kazoo then he and I are not so different. Nor you and I. I knew from day one the reality of this regarding the wide scale impact...I was screaming at talking heads on television down playing the risks and admitting in the same breath these would be no end in sight, no solutions...I read the worst case scenarios and as far as I could tell this was unstoppable. I'm too young to have experienced the china syndrome but I desperately want someone to tell me the worst case speculation is some hyped sensationalised fear not based in reality but mainstream fears.

...You're NOT "powerless". Poor people in Calcutta, living on a cup of rice a day, born into and doomed to spend their whole lives in a shantytown brimming with disease, crime and neglect, are powerless. Children born in failed states like Somalia, indentured servants of local thugs and gangs and warlords and genocidally unconcerned politicians (and there's about one degree of separation between 'em all) are powerless. People in Haiti who flee one abusive and homicidal junta-driven dictatorship after another, tearing down their houses with their bare hands to manufacture ramshackle rafts that sink in the middle of the Windward Passage, are powerless. Those Japanese who just had time to check on their families after the ground shook, went outside, looked over at their neighbors and were swept away by a fifty-foot wall of water, were powerless.

You and I aren't powereless... We're simply AWARE. Or, at least, we're getting there, perhaps for the first time in our entire lives.

I keep reminding myself what a singularly blessed, protected and nurtured land we live in. Modern America's been set apart from most of the ugliness that characterizes day-to-day life in most of the rest of the world. I've spent just a little bit of time in places most people don't think about outside of junior-high geography class, late-night basic-cable sponsorship commercials and the occasional "60 Minutes" expose. Life is a very, very different sort of animal for much of the world -- most of the world, actually. It's awfully random, often short, and for the most part, brutal.

Famine... Plague... Internal conflict... War... Terrible disasters. Some places can hardly catch their breath between potentially nation-ending tragedies. Their history is simply an unremitting tapestry of want, danger, and recurring apocalypse.

...And, you know, it's only been REALLY different, in this country, for about the last sixty years. My parents' generation, the boomers, were still dealing with polio, and in adulthood there was Viet Nam. For my grandparents, the challenges were the 1917-18 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II. THEIR parents had the Great War. And so on.

People in this country, just three or four generations back, had MASSIVE families. There was a spiritual component to that, yes, but also a practical one: You made 'em as fast as you could, as MANY as you could, because odds were a lot of them wouldn't survive to adulthood. Sad but true. My grandfather had ten brothers and sisters. They were lucky. Other families had barely enough to form a basketball squad. What was the difference? No one could say. That was just how the world was. People didn't EXPECT that their children would be born healthy, would thrive as children, would grow into adulthood and be able to count on seventy-odd years of active living. You were grateful for everything you had. The less you had -- money, land, things, living children -- the more grateful you were. People didn't feel ENTITLED... to ANYTHING. They thanked God for every plate of food set in front of them, because that meant they could live another day... And that was about ALL they could count on.

This is still the way people live, by the way, on nearly every continent (North America being the only possible exception), TODAY. Humble. Fragile. Grateful. People go on mission trips and wonder at the "simplicity" of folks in places like Honduras, Sudan, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia. Well, life gets REAL simple when you strip away all the crap we've been trained up to think is important. What do you do when your house catches on fire? Save your family, or save your iPad?

We've been a favored generation. I'm Generation X, hitting forty this year. I grew up in the last days of the Cold War. While I was in boot, the Berlin Wall came down. I participated in a "war" that claimed less than five hundred lives (on our "side"). I remember when my parents lost a bunch of money in the Crash of '87. I've had to downsize my life some in the last few years as the economy struggled again. And that's about all the real "challenge" I've had, in life. What a blissful, total ignorance I've had!

What we're getting a taste of, here, is what the REAL world -- the REST of the world -- lives with, and HAS been living with, practically since the world began. Go to Europe and find a country that's never been conquered, or forcibly settled / integrated, or sharply depopulated. You can't. The Black Death took one out of three Caucasians, by some estimates. Between two World Wars, what? Another hundred million, including the starved and the Stalin-slain. How many killed in the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami a few Christmases back? 250,000?

...Meanwhile, what have been OUR "disasters", here in the United States? 9/11? Katrina? BP? Big, certainly, to us, but let's face it, folks: It's pocket change.

...That's NOT to say that we're looking at some sort of mass extinction, here. My point is: America is realizing, perhaps for the first time in its existence, that it's NOT unique. It's NOT inherently indomitable. It's NOT immune to tragedy. This time, it didn't even have to happen within our borders -- and THAT's, I think, the difference. THAT's why I, too, feel "helpless". Because no one came over to our shores and did anything; the earth didn't quake within our boundaries; no nuclear plant in U.S. territory malfunctioned. It's in the air, drifting from half a world away, and we're just the first stop on its long, deliberate journey 'round the planet. It's as inexorable and unstoppable as, well, the wind. We're first because we're first... It's simply our turn.

Not a comforting thought for someone who grew up believing in the invincibility of America, the notion that we could do ANYTHING, that the rules didn't apply to us. A pretty damned humbling thought, really. I think that's what you and I are getting a taste of, here: That our total delusion of control can be blown away by, of all things, the dust on the wind.

But you're NOT "helpless". You have resources UNIMAGINABLE to billions of people. Access to information, experts, data. The ability to take certain actions -- sure, it's hard scraping together the dough for a filter or a case of water, but it CAN be done. It may require sacrifices, a change in lifestyle, for a time at least. A re-assessment of priorities. Truthfully, we probably needed to do it, anyway. Too many people are so busy thinking about their newest iPhone app, tee time or FaceBook Friend, they forget to play catch with their kids.

I know I've been guilty of this. No more.

YOU ARE NOT HELPLESS. You are being confronted with the troubling notion that the reality of the rest of the world is no longer crashing harmlessly on the shore and dissipating in the spraying foam. Trust me... I know. It's an unwelcome realization, that the air they breathe in Japan is different in degree, but similar in consistency, to the air we breathe here.

Do what you can. Let go of the rest. Do your due diligence, but don't allow yourself to become paralyzed by fear or uncertainty. Trust those you deem worthy of your confidence, and ignore those you don't. That's the point I've come to, anyway.

Sorry to preach -- Again, hope this helps.

Rick Cromack.
Allen, Texas
RichardFCromackJr@gmail.com
972-746-8575