Yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who works in hospice. She educates people about the process of dying and calls herself an “end-of-life tour guide.” She used a phrase that gave me pause: “the acceptance of denial.”

What does that mean? From her perspective, it means accepting that denial can be a natural and helpful part of living. Denial can enable us to keep up with the functions of daily life in the face of fear or grief that might otherwise overwhelm us. No doubt, our capacity for deploying denial is some kind of neurophysiological adaptation designed to aid in our survival and the preservation of the gene pool. It may have been the case that the primates the most adept at denial lived the longest and propagated the most. Acceptance of denial may be acceptance of Darwinian truths hardwired into our DNA.

But when I heard the expression, I was not thinking about hospice. I was thinking about Fukushima. I was thinking about the disaster in Japan which still has no end in sight, which is still fraught with possibilities of ongoing, uncontrolled nuclear explosions. I was thinking about the tremendous amount of water which will need to be pumped into the damaged reactors to prevent these explosions, and the as-yet unanswered questions about the disposal of those thousands of tons of highly radioactive water. I was thinking about the radiation which has now gone around the globe and which continues to spew into the atmosphere and seep into the ocean every day as a result of this ongoing catastrophe.

I was thinking about Fukushima… but I was also thinking about not thinking about Fukushima—something which is becoming easier and easier to do as the media moves on to new headlines and the lack of answers has become the official answer. Not thinking about Fukushima is facilitated by the reassurances that appear in tandem with each new revelation: "The radiation being registered around the world is negligible, insignificant." "The amount of radioactive water intentionally dumped into the ocean is infinitesimal when compared with the entire volume of water in the sea." "Passengers flying across the country are exposed to more radiation than the amount turning up most places." "It’s safe to drink the water, eat the cheese, buy the fish."

Denial. And now the acceptance of denial.

On March 11 and 12, I had been panicked. Three decades earlier, I was part of a global, anti-nuclear movement. I had been arrested for occupying a nuclear power plant—if you can call leaping into the arms of the police an occupation. With my fellow activists, I had made a study of the industry. We understood the tactics, could spot the rhetoric, sniff out the lies. On March 11, I understood much about what was happening—with multiple, core-reactor meltdowns; with the power behind the cooling systems not only knocked out, but knocked out for days and possibly weeks; with cracked containment pits; with multiple bomb-like explosions. I understood that this was the worst disaster and the most serious threat to life that has ever occurred on this planet... and with no end in sight.

And I was terrified. For two days. But terror is difficult to sustain when there are viable and attractive alternatives. I had a life. I was actually out on tour with extensive obligations. I was traveling. Besides, there was nothing I could do about it anyway. This was not the terror of being pursued by a predator, where the extra surges of adrenalin translate into bursts of energy and sustained stamina for self-defense or escape. The terror induced by Fukushima was a kind of frozen horror, where the adrenalin played itself out in obsessive speculation and nervous, non-productive activity.

In the world of the jungle, terror is incentivized. Experiencing terror saves one’s life. In a world with scenarios of nuclear holocaust, terror is not incentivized. Denial is. It becomes an attractive option in the face of helplessness and overwhelming doom, of unthinkable consequences for millions of people, for thousands of years. Denial conditions us to believe reassurances without questioning source or motive. Denial enables us to function as if nothing has changed.

I am in this denial now, and it is a great relief compared with the terror of March 11 and 12. The world has not ended. Yet. And that word “yet” appeals to my biology… the “acceptance of denial.” The patient is dying. There is nothing we can do. There is no point in dwelling on it. The best thing to do is go on with our living. For now.

Is this really what it comes down to? “Not with a bang, but a whimper…” Or, not even the whimper?

I have found a locus of resistance, one that works for me. And it has to do with what is visible and what is invisible.

We have become an increasingly visual culture. I know this, because I am a playwright by trade, and playwriting is an aural art form. People used to say they were going to “hear a play.” Fewer than one fifth of Shakespeare’s audiences could actually see the stage. There is a limited arena for action on the stage, and without special effects, the physical drama is usually embarrassingly bogus. In theatre, the drama is in the language—in the impassioned speeches, in the verbally violent confrontations, in the seduction of argument. As a playwright, I am acutely aware of how theatre has been left behind, like some kind of cultural oxbow lake, as the river of pop culture has moved over, carving out new channels in visual media: film, TV, DVD, Nintendo, 3-D movies, Youtube, Wii, etc.

And the more visual the culture, the greater our disconnect. Why? Because when it’s visual, it’s about appearances. The symbols begin to usurp the substance they are supposed to represent. Thinking, and especially deep, radical, and independent thinking becomes short-circuited as the gaze is directed by the ever-editorializing lens of the camera.

The evolution of our technology has vastly outstripped the evolution of our brain. We have not had the time in a few generations to evolve brains that can instinctively distinguish between dancing dots on a screen and dancing dots on the back of the retina. The boundaries between reality and fantasy, documentary and drama, video games and war games are blurring. Children under the age of four are acquiring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from watching on-screen violence. Celebrities are becoming government leaders. As humans become more and more attuned to a visual world, we become more and more easily manipulated by the images that we see. We have come to believe in what we see, whether or not it is real. And we are teaching ourselves to ignore or discount what we cannot see.

This is the problem with radiation. It is not visible. It can’t be felt or tasted. It has no odor, no texture, no temperature. It’s not as if Fukushima is being covered with ashes or buried in lava. It’s not as if there is a sulfurous, unbreathable gas hanging over the town. The sun still shines, the birds sing, and the flowers bloom. People have to be prevented from entering the zone around the reactors. People have to rely on readings and reporting from experts and agencies to tell them when they can drink the water.

And, as I said, denial has become accepted and acceptable. Because denial is natural in a situation like this, and especially in a culture so heavily oriented to the visual.

But has it always been natural to ignore what cannot be seen? Anthropology and archeology tell a different story. They tell us that, historically, indigenous cultures from every part of the globe have put a lot of stock in the unseen. Indigenous people have had many names to describe the ways in which the unseen world of spirit permeates and informs the visible and tangible world. There is Maori  “Dreamtime” or Hawai’ian “mana” or Yoruban “orishas.” The spirits of ancestors, of creators, of animals, of sacred places exist contemporaneously with humans, and rituals and codes have evolved to teach humans how to honor their presence and how to avoid offending them.

The ubiquitous spiritual systems of indigenous peoples point to the fact that ongoing consciousness  of the unseen is native to our evolution and our biology.  Had we not colonized our senses, we would have understood the blasphemy of splitting the atom, of creating a deadly waste material of which we could not dispose. We would have known that we were arrogating to ourselves the powers over life and death that should never belong to one species. We would have known that what we were doing was displeasing to the spirit world, constituting a profound violation of the sacred.

The sacred has been replaced by the profane in contemporary Western culture. We have electricity instead of spiritual forces. We have digital imagery instead of visions. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation [sic].” Radiation is the perverse counterfeit of spiritual substance. It is the by-product of the endgame of divorcing the material world from its spiritual animus. The splitting of the atom is just the final act in a brutal campaign of disconnection. In the words of Robin Morgan:

"If one had to name one quality as the genius of the patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. Science split from art. The earth itself divided; national borders. Human beings categorized by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum. The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present and disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision dissociated from reality."

I derive hope from the fact that it is possible to recover an apparently innate reverence for the unseen. I take comfort in this. I understand how I am incentivized by a corporate culture and by my own biology to deny the full horror of radioactivity. I accept that. I accept my  denial about Fukushima. I accept that this denial may even be natural. But I know that it was once in my ancestral biology to experience rich rewards from sensing the unseen spiritual essence of life and to find joy and peace in honoring that spiritual essence, in being a part of it, in protecting it and cultivating it in myself.

And because I know this, I choose to believe that this sensing of spirit can be recovered—uncovered, dis-covered, and revivified. And this spiritual seeing-of-the-unseen, unlike Fukushima, is powerfully incentivized… by faith, joy, and even ecstasy. It results in tangible enhancement of quality of life, of self-esteem, of sense of belonging. It also results in the reverence that would have prevented the splitting of the atom in the first place, and this reverence holds the potential to prevent the building of new nuclear reactors.

This attention to the cultivation of my spiritual sense is the most focused and effective and political response I can make to what is happening to the ocean and to the land and to the air and to all the forms of life on this planet.

Albert Einstein said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything except man’s mode of thinking.” I am choosing to believe and endeavoring to prove that he was mistaken.

Board games... I remember playing Candy Land... it was probably my first. And then, of course, there was Monopoly. I can remember figuring out early on that, unless one was adept at strategic alliances, the outcome of the game was pretty much determined by the toss of the dice.  It might take a long time to play out, but basically, if one landed early on Boardwalk and Park Place, it would be pretty tough to beat that monopoly. Then there was Risk, a microcosm of Cold War thinking and global domination.

Turns out, board games are ancient, the earliest one named "Senet" being pictured in a fresco in an Egyptian tomb from 3000 BC. "Patolli" was played by the ancient Aztecs, and the Royal Tombs of Ur contained the "Royal Game of Ur."

But let's go back to Monopoly for a second. If board games represent microcosms for cultural mindsets, it behooves us to understand the origin of this game. The game that taught me capitalism was, according to the BBC, a redesign of a board game first published by (wait for it) a woman who was a Quaker and a political activist. Her name was Elizabeth Magie. The original name was "The Landlord's Game" and it was intended to teach people how monopolies end up bankrupting the majority, while enabling a small minority to amass an ill-gotten fortune. On January 5,1904, the game was awarded U.S. Patent 748,626.

In 1933, three years after the start of the Great Depression,  the game was reinvented as "Monopoly," and it has become the most popular board game ever played. More than one billion would-be millionaires have passed Go and collected $200 in the eighty years since it's invention.

But something very strange seems to have occurred along the way from "The Landlord's Game" to "Monopoly." Life has begun to imitate art. We, as a planet, have begun to treat life as a board game, and the earth as the board.

Right now, as I write this, the greatest environmental disaster on the planet is transpiring. An explosion on an oil rig, due to lax oversight, shortcuts on materials and research, and exceptions to regulations, is causing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil to pour into the ocean.

That's a catastrophe. Now, imagine that the explosion had taken place in a building in Manhattan... and a fire is raging, destroying PROPERTY (keep that word in mind). Fire trucks and ambulances show up. But imagine government officials sending them home. "No, this explosion has occurred in a building owned by Widgets, Inc. and it is their responsibility to deal with it." And then, of course, Widgets, Inc. who is in the business of making and selling widgets, has to scramble to get in the business of firefighting and rescuing people... for which they have little expertise, less budget, and miniscule motivation... because the bottom line of a corporation is producing profits for their shareholders. Actually, there will be a certain tension between this firefighting/lifesaving and the interests of the stockholders. And, meanwhile, the fire rages on, spreads through the city, and destroys lives.

That would seem crazy, wouldn't it? As soon as the explosion occurs, the model changes. There is a full-on mobilization to deal with the disaster.

But that's not happening in the Gulf. Everyone is standing around and waiting for  Widgets, Inc.-- in this case, British Petroleum--to stop the destruction and save the lives. And this mission is definitely in conflict with their bottom line. We can see that. They immediately began to pour millions into public relations and lobbyists, because that's the kind of damage they understand: government regulation. That's the fire they are skilled at putting out. They have mobilized to keep the press away from the coastal areas. They understand company secrecy. They have raced to pour chemicals more toxic than oil into the ocean in order to sink the oil, get it out of sight. They understand the PR value of that, also... never mind that these chemicals will kill sea life. Out of sight, out of mind. And their CEO has complained about wanting his life back. Thousands of folks on the Gulf Coast have permanently lost their livelihood and with it the life they have always known, but the BP CEO has gone off to the yacht races in England, because, in his words, it's one of the biggest races in the world!

And is this their fault? They are, after all, a corporation. They do what corporations do. There is an unforgettable documentary The Corporation, which you can watch for free (and legally) on Hulu. It lists the characteristics of a sociopath, who is, admittedly, a menace to society... and then it goes down this list, showing how corporations exhibit every one of those characteristics... that, in fact, those characteristics are built into the very definition of a corporation.  And how absolutely disastrous to society this is, and especially, now that the Supreme Court has granted them the legal rights of an individual (human).

Corporations view the world as a monopoly board. There are opponents and allies in the game, but no real people. There is property, but no real planet with nature and ecosystems. And the reason why there would be a governmental response to an explosion in Manhattan is that this explosion would be impacting private property. But the explosion in the ocean...?  Well, nobody owns the ocean.  Nobody owns the floor of it. Nobody owns the water rights to the ocean. It's up to BP to fix it.

This seems crazy to me. And there were immediate offers of funding and expertise from other governments. These were turned down. Hands off! This is a corporate problem!  Goddess forbid anyone do anything that infringes on the territory of a corporation. The last thing this administration needs is more hysterical press about socialization, government takeover of business. Which is odd, because we have certainly nationalized a ton of banks and other financial institutions in the wake of the mortgage crisis. Isn't the "failure" of the ocean as an ecosystem something that would warrant a bailout?

But, the ocean is not a property. And the billions of ocean creature lives lost in this disaster do not form a voting constituency. And life is, after all, a board game.

Except it's not. We need to remember this. We are not the lords of the planet, we do not have rights over other forms of life. We act as if we do, but the day of reckoning, when we realize our interdependence, is upon us. Life is not a board game, much as some of us would like to believe that it is. If it was, all of us would be drawing the "Go Directly to Jail" card.

Tomorrow I am going to a gathering to grieve the dying of the Gulf Coast. It's going to be outdoors, overlooking Casco Bay, and it's being hosted by a meditation center. I need to go.  Last week I went to a "vigil" for the Gulf Coast that ended up being a noisy demonstration with signs and chanting on a noisy street corner with lots of traffic. Honestly, I felt foolish. It's not a war. It's not a controversial referendum. It's the greatest environmental disaster ever perpetrated. I don't think anyone thinks it's a good idea. And nobody knows how to stop it.

No, what I need to do is grieve. Specifically, I need help with grieving. When I read about the Coast, I notice that I can look at maps, I can follow the videos about corporate deceptions and censorship... but what I cannot bear are the stories about the animals. I can't look at the pictures, I can't hear the stories. I can't take it in. But I need to, because I am a part of the culture that has been so profligate in the uses of oil. How much plastic crap have I bought over the years? Why am I still bringing my produce home in plastic bags? I drive a car. I have driven a car since I was twenty-one. I can't pretend innocence. I need to be able to look honestly and fully at the horrors that are occurring as a result of a lifestyle in which I have fully participated. I need to be able to face, shame and guilt notwithstanding, the facts about the billions of forms of life that are dying and will continue to die as a result of my generation.

I need to grieve. That is the first step. I remember that, after she wrote her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was constantly confronted and asked "But what can I, as an individual,  do?"  She would answer, "You can make sure you feel right." That was a brilliant answer. Far more brilliant than "call you Senator." And far more difficult.

Stowe knew that the facts of human captivity, abduction, enslavement were overwhelming. Most white people retreated to some form of belief that somehow the suffering and horror was different for the captives than it would have been for themselves. They dissociated into economic models to prove that nothing could be done. They donated to an abolitionist group, and let that be the limit of it. To "feel right" was going to seriously impact their quality of life. To be aware, in an ongoing context, of the vast empire of human suffering that underlay their lifestyle was going to compel them in some small way to share the pain.

The most radical action I can do right now is feel what my species have done, with my knowledge and participation, to the Gulf Coast and its lives. And it is going to cost me. I can feel it. Otherwise, why am I shutting down over the information about the suffering wildlife. My life is going to change, when I can get to the full and appropriate extent of the grief.

Grieving is powerful. As an activist, I remember how governments have tried to control the funerals of dissidents, outlawing displays of grief. The Catholic Church in Ireland banned keening on several occasions. Keening was an expression of great lamentation... and it was traditionally done by the women. In fact, some of them would keen professionally. Keening was this kind of other-worldly wailing, a vocal vomiting of grief. I remember trying it once, and I was shocked by the sound of it, but also by the power. It reaches way down into the gut.  No wonder it was banned. When you cannot express grief, the feeling of it becomes stifled. And stifled grief is not good. 

I remember stifling a huge loss for ten years. It came out sideways in rage, and what couldn't come out as rage, roiled around inside me, contributing to an autoimmune disorder that sidelined me for ten years. When I remember this, I think culturally, what will we do if we cannot face the magnitude of this loss collectively? Will we ramp up our distractions, which are already ubiquitous? No doubt we'll consume. Bigger, better, faster. And what about rage, which is just about the only emotion big enough to trump grief? I think we're already seeing that. Blame is a terrific way to divert grief.

In fact, people will do almost anything to avoid grief. It's crazy. But we fear grief so much we will ruin our lives rather than go through a patch of grief that might last a month or a year. I am not sure why we are all so terrified of grief. The tragedy, the loss, has already occurred. But accepting loss is just something we humans really, truly do not want to do unless we absolutely have to.

I work a 12-Step recovery program. In fact, I owe my life to it. Those steps have helped me walk through grief over and over. Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, let go of results. So that's how I'm going to do this Gulf thing:

1) Show up. I'm going to the gathering. I'm following the news. I'm trying to face the wildlife thing. Not there yet, but I know I need to.

2) Pay attention. Trying to, like I said.

3) Tell the truth. Truth is, I'm not there yet. I want to forget, ignore. I would like to scapegoat and blame. I need to change. I want to live my amends.

4) Let go of results. If I can "feel right" about this situation, I believe that my life could change in radical ways. I can't let fear of that keep me from showing up, paying attention, and telling the truth. And that is where a spiritual component comes in for me. Hard to let go, maybe even impossible, if there is no trust.

Well... this is sounding like a sermon. Maybe it is. Yo, Deb Randall... This is the final day of the 5-Day Blog-off.  I did it! Thank you!  You got me launched... Sister!