Barbara Norfleet: High level radioactive waste storage tank: Savannah River Plant (300 square miles): Aiken, SC. 35 million gallons of high level radioactive waste are stored in the deteriorating tanks
Series/Book Title: The Landscape of the Cold War(1988)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Barbara Norfleet © Barbara Norfleet (2010)

"That's what Decency appears to be here for."

Indecencies seem radioactive to me. They perform like unstable elements, bleeding atoms on their way to becoming something else. They are by their very nature transitory and poisonous. They produce waste that outlives their original purpose. They prove unsuitable for use in anything lasting. We do not build bridges out of radioactive materials for good reasons. We avoid including them in connecting roads, too. They can produce relatively short bursts of extreme energy and, when properly harnessed, longer-lived power. Whatever the use, though, they leave behind messes far exceeding their initially intended usefulness. Their use requires more than usual justification.

I visited my dentist last week and noticed that they no longer draped a reassuringly weighted lead-lined blanket over me when taking pictures of my mouth. The hygienist explained that they now use such low doses of radiation that the blanket has become unnecessary. I asked if I could get one of their used ones, but she said they had been shipped to a radioactive disposal facility because they had absorbed radiation over time.

Indecencies, like radioactive materials, sometimes prove useful, though they always carry heavy externalities. They ultimately produce more waste than product. They exact costs on future generations. Those who dabble in indecencies and those who seem to deal exclusively in them tend to get poisoned by their close association with them. They contract strange cancers and wasting disorders that prove difficult to impossible to treat. The Muse and I live near the Hanford works, a place so poisoned from processing plutonium that it has become a perennial Superfund site. The economy of the surrounding area, the third-largest metropolitan area in the state, is primarily based on federal cleanup dollars. After eighty years, the clean-up effort has barely scratched the surface. Radioactive solutions tend to have very long tails.

Indecencies sometimes seem like the best of several terrible, conflicting options. I cannot argue that they’re not. I do know—or I’m convinced I know—that they’re more than likely to bite somebody in the butt on their way through whatever process they were intended to preserve. The “little white” entities tend to contain more gray area than anticipated. That “scot-free” sensation tends to ultimately misrepresent. Indecencies seem like those things where, because you don’t have time to do it right, you do it wrong so that it might get done, only to learn later that the solution only made the situation worse. Human beings can justify anything to themselves. For this reason, if no other, we must remain extremely cautious about what we choose.

Our incumbent seems to have chosen to ignore the Constitution he swore to uphold. This foundational indecency has already utterly undermined his presidency. He opted to ignore the law, which was as close to a measure of Decency as we ever possessed. He’s built radioactive bridges into an utterly delusional future. He’s built roads using unstable, poisonous materials. He’s produced imaginary changes, ones that will, as their primary effect, produce generations of terribly expensive cleanup efforts. He’s created a civic Superfund site without endowing the inevitable clean-up. His proposals have not even proved stable over short durations. They have no hope of lasting into future generations. His will be remembered as the short-sighted incumbency. Reform and cleanups will be his only lasting legacy.

The Radioactivization that already seems to be transforming society will very likely result in producing some utterly different politics than intended. Our billionaires could not have better reinforced public opinion against them than by publicly championing their self-serving agendas. They’ve proudly worn their cold-heartedness on their sleeves like unit patches on Onward Christian Soldiers’ shoulders. Rather than demonstrate the righteousness of their self-serving perspective, they’ve clearly demonstrated the opposite. Their radioactive initiatives should fuel a progressive backlash that should make the Roosevelt administrations seem like warm-up exercises.

The good news about unstable elements must be that they’re actively undermining their own existence. They are destined to degrade into something less poisonous if we manage to survive their half-life. The half-life of indecency seems indeterminate from somewhere in the middle of it, but its ultimate destruction seems inexorable. We can always build back even better than before. That’s what Decency appears to be here for.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz