I picked up a copy of the paper from the coffee shop on Wednesday because I was struck by the headline: "12 Miners Alive After 41 Hours." I knew from NPR's Morning Edition that morning that the headline was incorrect.
I can't imagine the process that the families of these miners went through. First, optimism that they could reach the miners quickly. Then, when poor air quality indications hit, they doubtlessly began to doubt. Time passed and they may have begun to come to terms with what seemed more and more inevitable. They were partly ready for the news.
That whole process was cancelled out when the good news of their survival arrived. In reality, the company has indicated that they had found the miners, not that they were alive. The message was bungled and when the families began to celebrate, the press ran with the story without looking back. The Star quoted the governor and family members, saying that they "just wanted to dance."
The dance ended 3 hours later when the error was corrected, though first runs of major city newspapers like The Star, the Times and the Post led with the wrong headline. Perhaps any dance in celebration of an effective corporate media ended at the same time.
There are several reasons to mourn about this, particularly in how the irresponsibility of media has exacerbated the obvious pain that the families have dealt with. I can't help but think that we should all be mourning the fact that those miners faced the risks they faced in the first place. In 2006, we are still sending men deep underground to extract a fossilized fuel source to run our high-tech gizmos? This cheap source of energy has a higher cost than we thought, between the millions that suffer from respiratory problems from the soot we put into the air and the countless miners who risk their lives to go get the stuff out of the ground.
Perhaps it is time that our energy sources, and our news sources, join us in the 21st century.
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5 comments:
while I generally agree with you, if we take away these fuels 100%, then we are displacing literally thousands of families that have for generations relied on mining to support their family. This is strictly a devil's advocate POV, but what do you recommend that we do with the thousands of unemployed miners, loggers etc...when we move to our Utopian world?
4:20, huh?
I've recorded your vital information in my records.
Sincerly,
GWB
The manual extraction of coal from the ground will become obsolete, and just as the people that made their living manufacturing coachwhips found new jobs when motorized carriages put them out of business, so will the coal-mining families.
The major problem, however, is how singularly dependent on the industry the entire region is. Unless other viable sources of employment make themselves available in the region, they are in for some very difficult times.
There, unfortunately, is no good solution to that.
bahua is a smart person.
The whole incident was tragic. I had similar thoughts of the irony of the situation of our "high-tech" society depending on people digging miles underground at their own peril.
It is unfortunate that the news of that the miner's condition was misreported to the families although it is understandable that the mining company and rescuers were anxious to report any good news after hours of rescue work. It is really a sad state that the new media did not check out the story before publishing the erroneous story.
That is an example of where we are today as I see it. Every business is concerned with being lean and mean and first at the punch. Competition is great, but not when it takes precedence over ethics.
The fact that we are still using fossil fuels is reflective of this same mentality - Companies looking at their ROI for the moment without any long-term vision. We should have been blazing a trail to new energy sources 40 years ago, however that would have displaced some "workers"...those with the most money...the investors and corporate execs. The real issue isn't finding jobs for the miners...it's what's in the wallets of the infamously wealthy. The jobs for the real workers would naturally follow the development of new resources.
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