The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

"Dear Ivy,

Your proposal is, and I am not exaggerating, a blockbuster.  You are asking fascinating questions and relying upon excellent sources.  My dual concerns are [blah blah blah blah blah blah]. I will give you the green light, along with the understanding that if things don’t turn out as well as you hoped, I will take into account the risks that you undertook.

(signed Professor So and So)"

  This made me want to dance around in a big, dorky self-congratulatory blushing muppet fit .

   First of all, in the span of roughly 12 hours, I went from caffeinated and snarking at the New York Times, bursting into giggle fits in class while eagerly anticipating the arrival of a friend this weekend, writing a maudlin postcard home telling my parents that Boston College was one of the best things that I ever did, to crying in the libarary computer lab looking at pictures of some old friends and worried that sometimes all of us tough-asses are not going to make it out of the jaws of the machine.

And then, by the grace of God,  in parachutes this professor, who, so clearly taken with my (admittedly stunning) enthusiasm for obscure construction details of the hydrogen bomb (I am researching worker’s perspectives from the construction of the Hanford Site, the first plutonium reactor) is excited to encourage my research because I am taking a risk.

If only we were all so supportive of each other. I feel like most of the time we are, but so often it’s so easy to get caught up in decisions that have precedent. Like, did you go to a workshop about that?  Did you read a book about that? Well, how do you know that’s going to be effective?  Well, when that happened to ME, here is what I did….(or, the perennial favorite, "was that consensual? I’m just asking")

At the risk of sounding ridiculously absurd, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past few years having a lot of not productive conversations. I realize this probably will not stop being true, for the rest of my life,  because people are people, and we’re all selfish and gloaty and demonstratively ridiculous.  We’re also tragically and fatally lovable, so it’s easy to get caught up in protecting each other from what we beleive to be a cruel and heartless world.   

But, that aside,  it’s interesting, sometimes, to sit here in this academic environment and talk about "taking risks."   As if we are suggesting that I’m going to, say, actually climb into a nuclear reactor to investigate the current radioactive levels. As if I am on the UN Weapons Inspection team and am making sure all my travel papers are in order to head to Iraq. I mean, we are talking about me spending (endless!) hours in front of a computer screen, analyzing a bunch of documents by people who took the biggest risk of all: "Shit, we don’t really know what this reactor is going to look like, or how big the explosion on this big-ass weapon is going to be, but let’s blow up the New Mexico desert anyway!" 

What risk do I really take?  That I reach too far in my assertion? That I identify too much with all of the construction workers who came from far and wide to escape their Depression era poverty?  That I will identify too much with the Priest River reservation Native Americans who had to be ferried back and forth to their fishing site every day by a DOE official, and who, in the end, got the complete and total nuclear contaminated, polluted, post-industrial shaft?

The questions that I am asking in my research are generally revolving around whether the ignorance of nuclear contamination from weaponry was due to optimism (did they think they would figure out how to contain it with the same speed that they realized they could blast everything to shit) or negligence (in their fight to stop Germany from developing the bomb, did they just not care how sick people would get in the future?)   I patiently want to beleive that people just didn’t know what Pandora’s box they were opening.  How could you — I mean, really, truly how could you continue to develop nuclear power if you realized half-life? 

But then I realize: that’s kind of patently Ameri-centric of me to get all crazy outraged about American scientists’ morals, when I am absolutely able to buy that the American scientists only developed the bomb to stop Germany, who developed the bomb first.  If Germany had developed the nuclear bomb first (and they easily could have, with a few scientists in different places), then would I even be sitting here at all wondering why the (German) scientists didn’t stop and cry foul when they realized they didn’t have an action plan for dealing with half-life and contamination?  I would proabably just lump them together as a bunch of Krauts who wanted to win the war at all costs — which is just what the United States wanted to do, but somehow I fervently want to beleive that American scientists had some sort of moral fiber.  I mean, it’s as if I am so unwilling to beleive that Ameican scientists would do something like knowingly develop nuclear contamination, when — all we’ve ever done is develop weapons. 

So it’s like, sometimes I really amaze myself with how much I want to beleive that, despite America’s absolute imperialist track record, that we are really a country that is made up of deeply human and compassionate people.

Again — things are staggeringly gorgeous and also excessively fucked up.  This is the same song and dance, and I don’t even pretend for a moment to see anything new in this day than I did a year ago (or even last week). But things do change. They really do change. Getting the green light on this research proposal — with the stamp of approval that I am reaching really far, that I am really bright, and that my questions are fascinating, despite that what I actually find might not support my initial findings — just reminds me that the biggest risk is always stepping outside of my ideology for a moment. The big risk here, I kind of think,  is that either I will find out that the truth is worse than I thought — American scientists didn’t give a shit about nuclear destruction or millions of civilians — or that Americans really are a slightly better lot than I want them to be.  That what if in all of this somewhere, I find confirmation that American scientists and workers did all that they could to care for the future but still got fucked in the end anyway.

I know this is, like, really hugely complicated and I’m kind of distilling it down — falsely — into black and white terms, which is what I’m always cautioning against. But it’s hard not to fall on one side or the other. It’s hard to sit in the middle sometimes and say, "yeah, I can see why they did that."  And I guess that’s what I’m afraid of — that everything that we so swiftly say "Oh my god that’s horrible, how could they have done that!"  is within the realm of human experience.

But the flip side to that, then, is that everything beautiful we can imagine is also possible. So the things that we think are so totally ingrained and will never change — of course they could change. Slowly and/or swiftly.

Next week: a reportback from Dedham High School and the discussion on Jim Crow laws!