Another Silent Witness:

On Friday 18, as part of the Christchurch Memorial Service the following video of the cordoned-off central area of Christchurch was played. The footage is eerie, haunting … the only sound that of sirens and the wind blowing through deserted streets and buildings brought to rubble. In the words of the Bruce Springsteen song, Christchurch is “My Hometown”—and this video clip is a more potent silent witness than any I could manage with my little camera in the ‘burbs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbXJJN9ZSFc&w=500&h=390

True Heroes

In Christchurch we have had to deal with the destruction caused by a major earthquake. In Japan, a level 9 earthquake was followed by a massive tsunami—which in its turn did serious damage to the Fukushima nuclear power station. The still unresolved struggle to get the situation there under control has absorbed our attention over the past week, but  a tv news clip on the evening of March 18 particularly caught mine. It showed a ceremony for the firemen who had volunteered to go to Fukushima and help with the containment effort.

Only that morning, I had listened to a radio interview where a nuclear power expert had said that the 50 or so personnel still remaining at Fukushima were basically already “dead men.”  I have often thought that we bandy the word “hero” around too lightly these days—any citizen who simply does their duty is termed a “hero.” But looking at the men who had volunteered to go to Fukushima, I thought: “This is true heroism. They must know the great risk they now run of dying as a direct result of volunteering, regardless of whether the situation at Fukushima is brought under control or not. And know, too, that the benefit of their individual sacrifice is exclusively for the wider society—yet still they volunteer. In this moment, these men—whoever they are now or whatever they have been in the past—are true heroes.”