Artwork & Content Copyright 2009 Jean Burman
Cartoon Pen & Watercolour 8″ x 12″
“Collateral Damage” appears in Heat 5 of the NewMatilda Political Cartooning Competition
I found the letter the other day. The one I wrote to my father over half a lifetime ago from the deep incarceration of Boarding School. I was complaining about the French. “How dare they!”… lept the resoundingly indignant words from the page.
I remember my father’s nonchalant reply had astonished me at the time. The acquiescence of it… something along the lines of “have patience they too have their story”… simply didn’t wash with me. I mean… he was an activist too wasn’t he? Well okay maybe not an activist exactly… although he had lobbied against fluoride and won back in the 50s… but that’s another story. But that strong sense of justice and penchant for doing the decent thing [I was certain] had been inherited from him.
So where was it?
In hindsight… his reluctance to fan the flames doesn’t surprise me at all… and might have had something to do with fears his young daughter might attempt to storm the Embassy… or some such silly thing? Well gee… a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do ~grin~
I believe it was the French who awoke the sleeping giant back then… in more ways than one. They certainly instilled in me a deep sense of disdain for self righteous injustice back in the 1970s. How anyone could go around blowing up, polluting and destroying someone else’s pristine back yard was beyond me.
The fact that it was my back yard… and the back yard of millions of other innocent and uninvolved people who lived in and around the South Pacific region (and more precisely downwind of Mururoa) at the time… probably had something to do with it.
And so it was that the world’s youngest activist and staunchest stickler for justice was born. I have the French to thank for that. And to everyone else I can only apologise! *wink*
The Good News.
You will be happy to know that the French Government… whilst stopping short of an apology… late last month opened their cheque book to begin the compensation process for those affected by the nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific over an astonishing 30 year period between 1966 and 1996.
The Bad News.
We will probably never know the truth about the full extent of damage to the fragile geology of the Mururoa and Fangataufa Atolls.
We will probably never know the full extent to which the health of the peoples of the South Pacific Islands has been affected.
The Sad News.
We will only know the full consequence of mankind’s greatest folly… the indiscriminant harnessing, mismanagement and misappropriation of nuclear energy… when it is too late.
The genie is out of the bottle…
and nobody knows how to stuff her back in.
PS I know Swine Flu is the topic du jour… but absolutely everyone’s talking about that! ~chuckles~
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