We are capable and we can learn.

When I was a little girl growing up in the post WWII-baby boomer 1950's I had recurring dreams about the atomic bomb. I am sure that it was related to the bomb drills we participated in at school. Every so often we had a drill and we all lined up and went out into the hall where we knelt down facing the wall with heads down on our knees and hands across the back of our necks. Generally we were two rows deep, little boys and girls getting ready for a bomb. I know now that that drill did nothing except make the post WWII parents-of-baby-boomers generation think we were doing something to be prepared.
When the nuclear reactors began to fail in Japan last week all the old fears that I thought had been long ago purged from my heart and spirit began to surface. Unlike an earthquake or a tsunami or a hurricane or tornado or other natural disasters, nuclear disasters are human made. Although human activity can contribute to natural disasters, human made disasters like nuclear attacks and meltdowns are completely avoidable because humans made them and we don't have to use them. We are capable and we can learn what is dangerous and what is safe.
The power of the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never ever have happened. Yet in the aftermath it seems that those who had created that power could not let go of it. Not only were newer more precise atomic/nuclear weapons created by people in the war industry, but people in the domestic/peace world could not let go either. Surely they dreamed, we could use all that power for peaceful purposes.
I remember standing in my mother's kitchen as she told me about the wonders of nuclear energy. Just a little bit of nuclear energy could power a whole city she explained. That was a dream that others were peddling as they sought to change people's minds about what had happened when nuclear power was unleashed on the world. We humans wanted to believe that creating that powerful source of energy was not a horrible mistake. Using that power, that dreadful, overwhelming, and deadly power for good would justify its creation. And so we were convinced that it was possible.
My mother also taught me not to play with fire, and yet it seems that from those early nuclear days there are some who insist that we should be able to play safely with an energy vastly more dangerous than fire.
My spirit tells me that evil is evil. There are some things that are not worth harnessing. Like a wild beast captured to entertain or to labor for others, powerful energies keep striving to get loose.
Nuclear energy is dangerous. We are unable to keep it captive. That is a lesson we have not yet taken to heart even though the disasters have happened over and over with death and fear and destruction and human and creature death and devastation.
But I believe we are capable and we can learn.
Today I will remember my childhood fears, combine them with the fears of the Japanese people, and use that fear as a reasonable source of energy to keep on simplifying my life.