WALLACE, Idaho — Last month's twin tragedies at Boston, Mass., and West, Texas leave this reporter a tad confused.
Five dead in Boston: three civilians, a police officer, and an alleged bomber. Fourteen dead in West, mostly volunteer firemen and working stiffs. The former, a decidedly yuppie event; the latter, bigger calamity, just working folks and volunteer firemen doing their jobs to make life better for the rest of us.
(I mean, a Marathon is fine fun. But does it enrich our daily lives? As opposed to the grunts who toil in America's factories, oil platforms and mines, who actually do.)
So why, as I surfed through the last two weeks of Sunday morning food-fight shows on CBS, ABC, and NBC the ensuing two Sundays (I missed Fox) has 98 percent of their attention been devoted to the Boston bombings and 2 percent of their air-time given to the 14 bereaved families in Texas?
Something rankles here. Have we become a society that honors people who can afford Nike running shoes over those who must wear steel-toed boots?
(Sorry about all the question marks. You don't mind, do you?)
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Dec. 6, 1917, an outbound French cargo ship carrying explosives — the S.S. Mont Blanc — blew up in harbour, killing more than 2.000 people and injuring 9,000 others. The Texas City refinery docks blow-up in April, 1947, killed 468 people that are known of (another 113 are still unaccounted for) and injured 5,000.
A highway bridge connecting West Virginia and Ohio collapsed in 1967 during rush hour, killing 45 people. (River Rats take note: It was called the Silver Bridge.)
Twenty years earlier, in 1947, a coal mine in Centralia, Ill., blew up and killed 111 miners. In 1972, 91 of our own brothers, fathers, nephews and uncles perished in the Sunshine Mine fire. Three months before Sunshine, on Feb. 26, 1972, a dam failed above the 16 hamlets comprising the coal-mining camp of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia failed, killing 125 people, injuring another 1,121 and leaving 4,000 homeless.
I don't hear the chat-shows talking about these working-man events, or about the remedies that labour, government and yes, even business, have wrought.
Maybe the new ethic in this nation thinks that working for a living is dangerous but, so what, and that running a Marathon should not be. The difference, of course, is that “Terrorism” was invoked in Boston. But what really went down in West, Texas? And what on God's green earth should separate our fear of “terrorists” from the every day chances of life?
Working people die every day, to bring our produce, our wood products, our cell-phone amenities and the plastics and metals that comprise our automobiles to market.
I don't mean to denigrate the deaths of those joggers in Boston. My heart is with their families. A loss is a loss. But how about a little respect for the factory-worker, or the hard-rock miner, or for that matter the lettuce-picker, who goes to work every day wondering if it's his last, and whose death will be the spear-head of the latest safety innovation.
It's obvilusly not something a Marathon runner in new Nikes need worry about. They have the Feds, and Terrorism, on their side.
