Much still on the air about the Sago Mine disaster and how miners' families were so cruelly misinformed. It makes for the kind of human story you'd hope we can all relate to.
But at the same time there aren't many of us who know what it's like to walk down into a hole in the ground every day; to work at a job that is so dangerous that the thought that it might kill you is both too awful to grasp and too real to ignore. I sure don't.
And we don't really know what it's like to be the families of those miners. It makes me cringe to watch reporters asking them things like, How did you feel when you heard that your brother/husband/father had died in the mine? Were you angry? Were you devastated? How devastated were you?
Oh, we love tragedy. Shakespeare wasn't the first to figure that out. It makes us feel something, makes us feel alive after too much Dancing With the Stars, or too many hours spent in grinding commutes to our own (if you'll pardon the expression) dead-end jobs. That's not a bad thing. If it breaks through apathy and stirs our outrage at injustice, even better.
That's why I hope someone will ask the owners of the Sago Mine why they had over 270 safety violations in the last two years. Or why their injury rate was three times higher than the national rate. How did you feel when you heard that the miners had died? someone might ask. Did you feel guilty? How guilty did you feel?
Is a $24,000 fine an acceptable price for neglecting the safety of your workers? How about $50,000? How about a million? Give us a number. Then maybe we can figure out how to stop this from happening again. It's a business calculation, fine. Let's do the math.
Whatever it takes.
Maybe I like tragedy as much as the next person. But I like justice better.
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