3/11

3/11 11

We learn some new words: Venting. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1. General Electric Boiling Water Reactors. General Electric Mark I reactor. Containment. Evacuation zone. Cooling. TEPCO.

We learn that there are six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power site. We learn that there are four nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daini site. We learn that these reactors are 200 miles north of Tokyo. And they are run by Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tepco.

Take a huge complex and dangerous power plant. Imagine an earthquake and a tsunami as a huge hand unplugging the power plant. Now imagine that without power, the plant cannot manage its dangerous fuel. Now imagine that pressure is rising in the plant, like blowing up a balloon to bursting. Now imagine “venting” the balloon so that it does not utterly pop; and that the air inside the balloon is toxic. Really toxic.

You are no longer sitting safely wherever you live now. Instead, you are one of the 3000 people living within a few kilometers of the site. You gotta get out, now. Or you are living ten kilometers away; you don’t need to go, just stay inside. Keep those windows closed. Try not to breathe.

Now you are starting to get it. 3/11 is 9/11 for the earth. It is Katrina and New Orleans; it is BP and its oil rig.

They are not going to protect you, whoever you think they are: the corporations that run these massive technologies. The government agencies that pretend to regulate them. The media that we imagine are watching the agencies watching the massive technologies and the corporations that deploy them.

So. What are you going to do? Yes, the world is in a fix, and there is no place to escape. But you’ve been escaping for years. Hoping they will not fuck things up. Hoping they will take their obscene profits and run things reasonably well.

Well, they didn’t. They never will.

Now it is that time, in the movie, when the main characters – the plucky teens, the isolated and marginalized hero and heroine, the animals threatened with extinction – find a way, however unlikely, to change the story line, to pull it out in the ninth inning, to hit the eleventh hour and find resources they never knew they had.

Ok, let’s roll the film.