As Brattleboro celebrates the Strolling of the Heifers, farmers in Fukushima, who might like to participate in such a lighthearted affair, face terrible choices. While Japan's nuclear catastrophe unfolds, farmers are forced to choose between abandoning their farms and animals or risking their own health and safety.
Some return to care for their starving animals. They milk their cows knowing that no one will ever drink the milk, because the thought of abandoning their animals is unconscionable.
This once-rich farmland will be uninhabitable for decades. Farms will remain abandoned and a way of life destroyed.
After the Chernobyl accident, many peasants returned to their homes, because leaving the land their ancestors inhabited was worse than living with the constant fear of radiation.
These are terrible choices. In spite of the cohort of industry advocates who today attempt to promote a blossoming animal refuge, the wreckage of people's lives remains.
We constantly make choices that involve risks: drive our cars, smoke cigarettes, board planes. Did these farmers - or for that matter, the schoolchildren who wear masks to play outside their kindergartens - get to choose?
There were no opportunities for informed choice. Instead, there were assurances about how safe nuclear power was and how it would benefit those communities.
Where are these assurances now? What compensation is great enough to replace a destroyed way of life?
As we celebrate agriculture and community with this wonderful event known as the Strolling of the Heifers, we need to take a moment and remember the impact that the nuclear industry has had on our farmers in Japan and Russia.
Will it happen in America someday? Not if people make it clear that the risk is too high and our way of life is too important to jeopardize.