Chernobyl
April 26, 1986, at 1:23 AM, reactor #4 exploded.
First-responders in the cult of security that arose after 9/11 are untouchables. While budgets are cut, the items labeled "first-responders" remain intact. The phrase is used as a rhetorical device, and all the way down the law-and-order food chain, men and women who seek authority, security and the occasional doughnut rise up above the hum-drum of domestic violence and public drunkenness and stray livestock on that turn of phrase.
On September 18, 2001, the first-responders in Lower Manhattan were told by then-EPA Administrator Christie Whitman that the air was safe to breath. But most of the actual "first-responders" were just people who turn towards need. Not paid, not sworn, not subject to disciplinary hearings. The people the Bush Regime exploits in the choir and abandons in the courts. A lot of them are dead, or dying, or just wicked sicker than they'd be if they turned away from need and left the problem to the Regime motivated by Grover Norquist.
When Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in February 1986 his victory speech included this line1:
Do not wait for orders from headquarters. Mount up everybody and ride to the sound of the guns.
The first-responders the night of April 26th, 1986, had shovels and firehoses. Nearly a million men and women worked the clean-up, to contain the mess. And 25,000 are dead.
It bugs me that the candidate packaged as "hope" in the Democratic primary process is a sock puppet for Excelon. It bugs me that the odds are wicked high that we Auntie Nukes are going to have to try again to stop the nuclear nutmen, this time in new and improved packaging as "low carbon", and this cycle's most effective electoral crooner is warm and fuzzy towards atoms for peace.
Isn't voting "for security" voting against the likelihood of having only whatever can be salvaged from equipment of the crews that went before you, and proceeding towards, or away from, some point on the horizon?
1The Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations by Robert Heinl, published by the Naval Institue Press in 1967 cites the Precis Politique el Militaire de la Campagne de 1815 of Antoine H. Jomini as the source of sentiment romanticised by Pitchfork Pat.
