A Herculean Task

The evil that you unleash will be the evil that destroys you. No, I'm not dissing Michael Vick for past sins that may have come back to haunt his leading a football team to the playoffs. I'm referencing the Greek epic tale of one man's conquest of nature and humanity. In particular, the feeding of a rival king to his trained man-eating stags.

I think it ironic that today's Manhattan Project is threatening our economic quality of life, just as a previous expenditure threatened the quality of life in general. History attests to the fact that the most substantial ingredients for human existence have come from nature's above-ground bounty. Nature provides grain which we depend upon as drink, food and fuel. Nature provides sunlight which plants and animals need for growth, warmth and nourishment that end up on our tables. Nature is the earth, air, fire and water that we use for subsistence.

Mythology, our early understanding of nature, suggests that there are powerful elements better left unearthed than unleashed. The obvious one, I would think, is the polymer that resembles the many-headed monster that, though severed from its organic root, sprouts ever new and indestructible possibilities. Just look to our landfills and polluted waterways for these petroleum-based villains we call "plastic". The industrial revolution found iron ore and coal to be a steal for the relatively small amount of disfigurement and defilement of the earth and those dependent on it for survival.

Then came the element of the cosmos called "uranium". Its mysterious, unstable connection to the radio hit the airwaves over an island called "Japan", fishing and fusing it like never before. It was the classic Herculean task of horsepower in the service of flesh-eating destruction.

If our world really needed throw-away plastic containers, energy whose deadly by-product is ageless, steel-guarded speedways (not to mention gold face-treatments), I would still be standing against the gods of industry. But when there's a country that considers U.S. its rival, knows the story of Hercules as well as the history of nuclear development, and probably endorses the moral cited at the beginning of this blog, then continuing to bury our head in the ground is just fracking crazy.