Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [33]
So we stood there onstage, singing every stupid cover song we could think of while staring blankly at the clock on the wall at the back of the hall. The kids sat there, the girls with their big hair, and the boys with their ball caps on backwards, and stared blankly back at us.
In the cafeteria after the show, we nervously picked at our free food while we waited to be paid. A cafeteria worker, who also worked part time at the Hanford Reserve, gave us the low-down. He told us that at the Reserve they monitor how badly radiation is escaping the reservation by the use of dogs roaming the grounds. Like canaries in a mine shaft, the dogs, and their droppings, are examined, and eventually, after they get sick and die, the dogs and all their poop are frozen and put in a vault underground. In fact, this guy’s job, among other things, was to go around and collect those droppings, and the dead dogs themselves.
Are you hearing and seeing this?
In a vault, underground, are thirty-odd years of dead dogs and all their shit. That, plus mountains of deadly nuclear waste all kept in primitive canisters that leak.
Does this sound like High Science to you?
Homo sapiens has been around, as far as we know, for approximately four million years. About four thousand years ago, they invented the plow. Quick, name the top five events in human history occurring between four million and four thousand years ago. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. That means that there are 3,996,000 years of human history unaccounted for. I think about this when I hear the usual team of know-nothing journalists and experts-for-hire discussing hazardous waste and what to do with it.
I’m thinking, hey, if the average civilization on this planet is measured in hundreds, not thousands, of years, and, if the history of all known civilizations is somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand years, and if the end of each civilization typically culminates in the near-total destruction of not only society but also the knowledge, religion, mores, and culture that engendered it, then how reasonable, or even logical, is it to talk about hazardous waste that has a half-life of lethal contamination lasting twenty thousand years? How can any such argument that takes as its premise the acceptance of such a risk as worthy be anything but ludicrous, stupid, criminal, and wrong? After all, we are being forced to accept a hazard that outlasts all of recorded history by a factor of fifty. Think of the minds behind such a thing.
Progressives, feminists, eco-feminists, new world spiritualists, enlightened historians, scientists, concerned citizens, and others seeking insight and solutions to these and other difficulties, both physical and cosmological, are just starting to look into this 3,996,000 years of missing human history. These theorists—revisionists you might call them—suggest that before the invention of the plow, men and women roamed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years as partners, hunting and gathering and sharing the burdens of human existence. The question seems to be just how the hell did anyone let the men take over? There is a lot of finger-pointing going on; a lot of blame-laying. They suggest, further, that the last few thousand years of male dominance is just an anomaly, soon to be corrected by the Darwinian swings of historical necessity; that being a cooperative community of humans is normal and that being barbarous murderers, rapists, and despoilers of the Earth is the exception.
Scholarship aside, I, for one, am willing to say, “Sure, why not? Let Alternative Universes abound!” But I would remind you