Comments | carolinelamb: Heavy hearted

carolinelamb

Heavy hearted

Aug 03, 2011 23:34

On July 19th the people of Fukushima asked the government in a meeting to answer their questions and organise the further evacuation of the radiated areas since the radiation level has increased in the last months. (Later it should turn out that the government had lied to the people all along and downplayed the real level of radiation ( Read more... )

non fic, real life, japan

Comments 3

kohrin August 4 2011, 23:09:33 UTC

I know we need government. The world would go to hell damn fast without it, but that the government has such power that they can essentially tell people 'I don't know that your lives are important enough to do anything about'...that's horrible. It's so obvious over there now, but governments like this are a worldwide disease. I wish I knew what the answer to it was. I'm sure the truth will come out eventually, but by then, it will probably be way too late.

carolinelamb August 5 2011, 01:59:51 UTC

Call me an idiot, but I believe the real purpose of governments is-should be-to create people, a world in which we don't need governments.

I come from a country where the relationship between government and its people is fundamentally different, so in the first years it was very interesting to observe the difference in attitude.

In Japan the government has taken advantage of the faith people have, a faith which is of course carefully fostered and conditioned from preschool age on.

Meanwhile TEPCO, Japan's Energy provider officially disclosed that they had been lying about the radiation level in the area from the very beginning, and more people are being evacuated. TEPCO also has to pay compensations and will probably cease to exist in this form.

kohrin August 5 2011, 10:51:16 UTC

I don't disagree with the ideology of that statement, but, when it comes right down to it, I'm a realist. A government should support their people and, essentially, do for them what they can't do for themselves. Then again, I'm in the US and I'm on the 'why in the hell don't we have universal healthcare' bandwagon. Our government over here is so corrupt that the people, as a rule of thumb, don't trust a single word the government says, because you CAN'T. Because it's ALL bullshit in one form or another. So to hear 'oh, the government has been lying', my first thought is something like 'gee, the sun must have risen this morning'. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think they should own up, I think they have a moral obligation to, but I also think that governments, by their nature, are not moral, because the people IN government are not moral. It's a self-sustaining system in which corrupt politicians breed more corrupt politicians who make excuses like 'we don't want them to panic', when in reality it's far more like 'we don't want ( ... )