I keep wanting to weep for Japan. This tsunami is the most appalling natural horror I have ever witnessed, Banda Aceh and Haiti included, and that's saying a lot. But that's not what keeps me on the verge.
No, it's the cascading reactor failures unfolding at Fukushima that have got me so keyed up.
I don't know about the rest of you Boomers out there, but I still remember Duck and Cover. I still remember my otherwise level-headed 6th grade biology teacher going off on long raps about heading out for Montana and living underneath Flathead Lake (don't ask me how). I still remember the Doomsday clock, and the bomb shelter in my neighbor's backyard.
The unspoken, ever-present, background dread of a '60s childhood was atomic. What I'm experiencing now feels almost like a post-traumatic stress reaction--except that it never happened! (To us. Ah, Hiroshima; ah, Nagasaki!) So this is maybe like a pre-traumatic stress syndrome? For the disaster that never came to pass? I don't know. But god help the people of Japan, that they should pay again.