Written by Bob Maschi   

“We’re all doomed, y’know! The whole silly, drunken, pathetic lot of us!” Fred Astaire’s character in the 1959 movie, On the Beach, reminded everyone.

And I know how that character felt.

You won’t hear much in the popular press about the ongoing and increasingly volatile crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. This is, without doubt, the worst nuclear accident in our short atomic history. Worse than 3-Mile-Island, worse than Chernobyl, and far worse than Great Britain’s Windscale Fire (yeah, I hadn’t known about that one either, until I began researching this column).

Don’t doubt that this is a true, global catastrophe with possible consequences that outweigh every, yes every, other issue. I am not exaggerating when I state that the worst-case scenario is the end of most, even all, life on this planet. With that as the worst-case scenario, no matter how remote, one might think that Fukushima should lead off every news broadcast, headline every printed paper.

Yet it doesn’t. Finding concrete and rational information is difficult—especially for someone without much of a science background. But here is what I have gathered (and I am making an honest attempt to not exaggerate).

Background: in 2011 an earthquake and subsequent tsunami overwhelmed the safety controls at Japan’s large nuclear power plant(s) in Fukushima. The news exploded across the planet, but quelled as temporary patches seemed to postpone a meltdown (a meltdown is the severest accident where large amounts of radiation are released into the environment and… well, no one actually knows exactly what would happen after that). Two years later, news of Fukushima has nearly vanished from the mainstream media, but the situation has worsened. TEPCO (the corporation which owns the plant and is trying to manage the crisis) has announced that 300 tons of radioactive water are now being flushed, daily, into the Pacific (one can make two assumptions here. First, that the estimate is a very low one. Second, that this amount of radioactive water will be spilled into the Pacific for, well, forever—dwell on that for a moment). One nuclear core is increasingly difficult to cool and is heading for a meltdown. TEPCO, which has proven itself to be far more interested in its profit margin than in curing the problems, has plans to perform some incredibly risky and delicate maneuvers to ease the situation—which if not handled perfectly (and I mean perfectly), could easily make matters much worse.

And this is why we are all ‘On the Beach.’

On the Beach is an incredibly powerful movie with big stars—Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire… A nuclear war has wiped out all life in the northern hemisphere. Australians and a small group of visitors are all that remain of the human race and radioactive winds are moving in their direction. This is drama—not action nor war—focusing on the people waiting months for their unavoidable deaths.

They drink, they love, they party, they fish… and they drink some more. They are a somber (though not sober) crew full of “morbid discussions” and regret. The waiting is the archenemy… the pause between life and death. That gap between Adam’s finger and god’s.

Throughout the film Waltzing Matilda plays. The perfect song. Australia’s ‘unofficial’ national anthem, it’s about a hobo who commits suicide rather than face the law for food he had stolen.

“If everybody was so smart, why didn’t they know what would happen?” A tipsy Ava Gardner asks.

“They did,” Peck replies.

So why is TEPCO still in charge of this clean up when they are obviously incapable of handling it? Why hasn’t our government acted, seemingly at all, in an attempt to calm the tragedy or to warn us of the potential consequences? Why hasn’t the global community rushed in? Why has the media generally ignored this to focus on ‘news’ that is, by comparison, trivial? I can only think of a few possible reasons.

Perhaps our government and Japan’s government have been made so incompetent by large doses of libertarianism that they are not capable of major actions. Nations that once built national highway systems, dams, airports… nations that have begun to explore dark space and yes, even nations that have engaged in near global wars, are now too castrated to rescue the planet we all need to survive upon. And, while the corporations that now control the planet can find great profit in creating disasters, there is no profit, and therefore no incentive, in cleaning up after those disasters.

Or, maybe, from the beginning of the accident, the people ruling over us knew that it was a global catastrophe that would lead to the extinction of all life on earth. And as GW Bush might have suggested, we’ll all be better off if we just go shopping.

Or, the corporate puppets in charge of this country, including Obama and his administration, are so beholden to the energy industry that they dare not tread on its potential profits. That the survival of the nuclear power industry is, to them, more important than even human existence.

Or, most likely, some odd combination of all the above.

Maybe, rather than worrying about something I have absolutely no control over, I should go out, have a beer and get laid (okay, reality check, have a beer and TRY to get laid). Whatever happens, will happen. Besides, moving to the southern hemisphere if this situation worsens (as Dr. Helen Caldicott, a long-time Australian anti-nuke activist, has suggested) is neither physically nor economically feasible for me. So I will wait. I’ll watch some old movies, crash my diet (I didn’t like it much anyway) and, maybe, learn how to waltz.

Living inland, an hour’s drive to the Pacific, yet still, on this very crowded beach. We wait.