Independent Verification and the Chernobyl Rider
There's a note in the forum at the Urban Exploration Resource that the Chernobyl bike rider story (briefly mentioned in this blog here) is actually false. I still haven't decided what is more disappointing: (a) that someone went to all the trouble to craft such a narrative; (b) that I got suckered (well, a lot of us did); or, (c) that I was really saddened that there was a place where the radiation ruled.
(c) is the front runner right now. When I first read the story (don't bother with the link I gave on the entry above, the page is gone now), I was tickled that Nature was healing itself faster than we were and that the animals had already taken over the area. Though with all that supposed radiation, the next generations would have extra eyes and superfluous snouts and what not. (And it occurs to me now that the bit about the animals returning may actually be one of the only true bits of the narrative.) The story played to my fears of a nuclear holocaust -- I readily believed that there would be a place on this planet that mankind had ruined through a radioactive disaster -- and I willingly took the bait.
Who is to say that this person who is debunking Elena's story -- though she's not the only one -- isn't part of the political machinery who is trying to bury the fact that Chernobyl really is a nuclear wasteland. "It's a fine place to visit. Just don't stay outdoors to long and make sure your mask is tight." It's all about the spin and it's all about what you want to believe.
I can't bring myself to blog about the many other instances of the political machinery that is spinning stories right now. Every day there is another story in the blogsphere about American atrocities in Iraq or signs that this country is being run as a cost center and that our leadership are corporate bean counters who are nothing more than whores and pawns for the conglomerates which have funneled money into their pockets. Of course, the "liberal" media is trying so hard to cozy up to those in power (fear? stupidity? I can't decide why) that they can't be bothered to actually chase a story that has some real importance to our forward progress as a species. (I won't even bother wondering how we, as a nation, allowed ourselves to impeach a President over getting a little action in the White House and yet we've allowed The Hand Puppet to murder [by proxy] our own sons and daughters and to destroy decades worth of world-wide goodwill.)
So, yeah, I took the bait about the Bike Rider of Chernobyl. I wanted to believe something there. And maybe that's the problem with all of us right now. We want to believe something. We have to. We can't independently verify every fact that crosses our perception. We've got to ground ourselves somewhere. Is Mary Mycio's story about Chernobyl more true than Elena's Ghost Town? I don't really know. Maybe it is what Robert Anton Wilson says: you must believe nothing.
Though, if enough people witness the same hallucination, then it becomes "true." And maybe they're smoking some serious weed in the tunnels underneath the White House because there is some version of reality coming out of there that is so alien and strange that I can't imagine the byzantine pathways which the spin must take in order for these actions and events to be read as beneficial to any of us.