Heavy hearted

[carolinelamb]

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

Comments

[kohrin]

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 them to know'.

So, while government SHOULD exist for this reason, or for that reason, for the most part it exists for its own benefit, and the benefit of the people at the top milking the system. Unfortunately, that means the rest of us spend a lot of time getting stepped on. Government is necessary. The lesser officials are doing jobs that need to be done, I think (people in charge of things like paving roads, and making sure we have a drinkable water supply), but the big guys? They only care about themselves. Maybe that's a very American attitude, I don't know. I feel bad for all the people in Japan who have no idea how bad it is and what their government is hiding, but I also think 'this is just evidence of what I always knew. This is how governments are.'