Pirate's Cove

When something happens, the Cult of Climastrology will attempt to hijack it. In this case, you had a tremendous show on HBO showing what happened during the Chernobyl disaster (watch it if you can, I’ll give it 5 stars), so, hey, why not horn in with ‘climate change’?

Chernobyl Blew Up My Childhood. Will Climate Change Do The Same For My Kids?
I was a 10-year-old in Kiev when the Chernobyl explosion destroyed my faith in my country and my family. Now I wonder if history is bound to repeat itself.

The spring of 1986 was warm in Kiev, Ukraine. White chestnut blossoms dotted the greenery. Cotton ball–sized fluff from poplar trees rolled over the grass in the courtyard of our apartment building. April 22 was Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. All of us third-graders boarded trolleys to ride to the Lenin Museum, thrilled for the ceremony we’d been anxiously awaiting — the ceremony we’d worked so hard for. We were becoming Young Pioneers. Our parents had bought us the red kerchiefs, and we’d practiced tying them around our necks just so, puffing our chests when we caught our reflections in storefront windows.

After school, I insisted on wearing my Young Pioneer uniform (white shirt, navy skirt, red kerchief) to run to a store to buy food for my birthday party the next day, April 23. My mother and I used the dining table in our communal apartment’s kitchen, which we shared with two other families, to roll out pie dough. The heat from the oven baked my neck under the starched shirt collar.

“Are you proud, little Pioneer?” asked our neighbor Irene, summoned out of her room by the aroma of the baking pie. “You look good in red.”

Who here can remember a specific event with such clarity from back in 1986? Because Sophia Moskalenko keeps going on with this very specific recollection, before

On April 29, our next-door neighbor Olena came to my mother for a cup of coffee. Usually, they sat on the landing between the apartments, sharing an ashtray atop a wooden chest that stored potatoes and onions through the winter. But that day, Olena took my mother by the elbow and escorted her into our room, closing the heavy oak door behind them. Olena’s abrupt manner troubled me. I slid up the bronze shield of the pre-Revolution lock and peeked through the keyhole.

“Don’t open the windows,” Olena said, leaning forward in the armchair, brow furrowed. “Wipe everything with a damp rag. Don’t let Sophia go outside.”

Um, most had zero idea what was going on in Chernobyl. Nothing. Because the government clamped down. Heck, most in the closest city, Pripyat, where the Chernobyl workers lived, had no idea. Anyhow, this keeps going on and on and on, till we finally get to

But decades later, I still find Chernobyl burning in me.

With extreme weather events pummeling my chosen country, the present US administration’s avoidance and outright denial of scientific evidence that an environmental disaster wrought by climate change is upon us reminds me of April 1986 in the Soviet Union, when the Soviet government said we would all be fine. In Kiev, we hadn’t witnessed the glowing fire of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. The radiation was invisible, its damage slow to transpire. The government’s reassurance was far more appealing than the scientists’ dire assessments. We embraced government lies then for the same reason many do now — because the threat was subtle, and the truth costly.

The comparison between Chernobyl and climate change may seem in some ways far-fetched: Chernobyl was an unexpected, localized event that resulted from bad decisions of a handful of people, whereas climate change is a slowly unfolding global issue that stems from the choices of billions. The striking parallel I see is not in the top officials’ actions but in an average person’s reactions. Both in the USSR of 1986 and in the USA of 2019, too many people choose complacency and compliance over alarm and action.

Oh, wait, you thought that was pretty bad?

Today, the average age of my three children is about 10, the age I was when Chernobyl exploded. Struggling to limit their exposure to pesticides, pollution, and plastics, I wonder if I am doing enough to shield them from the Chernobyl of their lifetimes. As I teach them to recycle and to conserve, I often feel as though I am spooning water out of a sinking boat. Perhaps my resigned perseverance is a hallmark of parenting: repetitive, seemingly futile actions that one hopes will eventually lead to a desirable outcome — like telling them to pick up their socks. Or maybe my efforts reveal a survivor’s hypervigilance — similar to the way survivors of hunger hoard food in times of plenty. Whatever the reason, I see climate change as a test of my parenting.