It is a rare blessing when the earth gives back up those it has trapped within.
Early Wednesday morning, as I watched a live video feed of the first of 33 Chilean miners emerge safety from the San Jose mine after 69 days, I was overcome with emotion.
It was a feeling any miner would relate to. As Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said, "miners everywhere cheered the fulfillment of our hopes and prayers."
And yet I couldn't help but think of the lack of safety protections for miners in all parts of the world -- in China and in the United States as well as in Chile.
This is a subject that's very personal for me. Long before the idea that I would or could serve working people on a national level, I followed my father and grandfather into the Pennsylvania coal mines. My seven years underground taught me more than I can easily say, but one thing that was burned deep into my heart was the preciousness of life, of fresh air, of returning home after a day's work.
Yet too often, in the blind pursuit of profit, safety becomes a corner to be cut -- not just for miners but for every type of worker. Our lives become nothing more sacred than a commodity.
In this environment, disasters can't be simply dismissed as accidental -- any more than a drunk-driving death can be chocked up as another little mishap on the road. Even if that's what CEOs like Don Blankenship of Massey Energy and Republican senatorial hopefuls Rand Paul of Kentucky and John Raese of West Virginia might want to do.
Despite a deplorable safety record at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, Massey Energy's Blankenship shrugged off the explosion that killed 29 miners last spring as "unavoidable." Raese, meanwhile, wants to "unshackle" business from government regulation -- like the kind that keeps miners alive.
Last summer, two young coal miners died in western Kentucky when a roof collapsed. Amid allegations of safety violations, candidate Rand Paul's response was to say "sometimes accidents happen."
So while I cheered for the miners coming up from the ground beneath the Atacama Desert, it was painful to recognize yet another sign of the dangerous, corporate-driven agenda that has far more regard for the bottom line than for working people.
Raese doesn't only want to get rid of regulations on business. He's vowed to kill the minimum wage and--like too many other candidates in his party--he's railed against Social Security and unemployment benefits. They want to erase whatever America has put in place over our history to make life for working families safe, secure, decent and livable.
That's not my vision of America. Too many people have given their blood for this country -- from the mines to the battlefields -- to see us become a heartless nation in which only wealth equals power and value.
Mines don't fall apart by accident. Neither do economies. They crumble from choices and policies that put profits ahead of people -- and leave working people in the rubble.
But we can -- and I believe we will -- rise from America's economic disaster just like those Chilean miners. They're strong. So are we.
Dr. Cara Barker: What the Chilean Miners Can Teach Us About Hope
Wonder which side of the line you fall on?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/23/us-washington-metro-train-crash
maybe the dc metro and the other union accidents could be fixed too...
but this is how he feels about that.. most important to make sure everyone gets raises.
http://www.atr.org/dc-metro-union-forces-unwanted-exercise-a3216#
People who then understood what they owed to the sacrifices of those before them. Who also understood that personal survival was linked to the common good. Which is why we celibrate the rescue of the Chilean miners.
Something that anyone who has worked in a dangerous job knows by experience. When old-fashioned labor people say sister and brother, we mean it. We do not fall for the mythological Randroid propaganda of atomized, disconnected wanna-be "individualists" who think that they do not need anyone else.
Or who think they need not respect us. A couple of decades ago, we were personnel. Now we are human resources. Bodies to be used up, like the dead US coal miners. Those miners are the proverbial canaries. Falling wages, and falling safety standards over the last decade. An economic system that considers them expendable and does not believe that they have a stake in the wealth they help create.
Finally the devastation miners experienced has hit the white collar middle class. Job loss, mortgage crisis, retirement funds gone. What started in the Rust Belt has arrived in the suburbs. That lesson of the common good as appropriate now as it was a century ago.
The "little people" have risen up on the basis of their merits, not due to some demands from the masses. People will continue to rise up on the basis of merits, which disappoints latter-day communists.
If you're capable, welcome to the ranks of the empowered. Otherwise, well, good luck and get used to it.
You apparently have no experience with empathy, no experience of working together, no experience of the foundational American value of consideration for the common good. An idea also central to our Judeo-Christian heritage.
That silly anachronism of using the word communist. Discredited as unAmerican in the 1950s. Even the reality of the Cold War was not enough for Americans to tolerate non-sequitur smears.
So history is not your thing. Thus you are unaware that we peasants had to fight for the right to an education. Had to fight for the right to representation; something recognized by the Real Whigs in England and concurrently by those arguing for the right for representation in the colonies.
Same for those who were not propertied, as early American voters were. Also for civil rights and enfranchisement for African-Americans. And for women. No one of those born to the purple bestowed the status of "empowered" on those below. These rights came about through the concerted efforts of organized groups. As did the right to an education.
Your thinking, your inarticulate expression, and your historical accuracy are wanting. You must then not be of the ranks you defend. Wecome then to our ranks; people not desperate to prove superiority. Who aren't too good to work together to make our country, our schools, and our economic system better for us all.
It can not be called achievement on the basis of one's merits when one must be of the upper classes for one's merit to be noticed and developed.
F/F...wish more people could see how it really is.
I'll sit back and wait for that to happen,
Author: THE MINE
http://www.themine-thebook.com/index.htm”
Where the Chilean miners were digging is hard rock where the combustible gases tend to not build up.
Without the evil profit motive (the same one that makes people mine to begin with), these men would be dead. Unless we are all either living in Utopia or the state of nature, there is going to be a drive to get things done. Capitalism happens to be one of the best, and for everything it might seem to threaten to take away, it gives back far more. Just ask Soviet Russia or contemporary Cuba.
Its a dangerous job
So is being a soldier in Afghanistan
Over the past 100 years more than 100,000 miners have died at work underground in the USA alone.
How the unpaid non union unemployed individuals you used for your club doing these days. Could you tell me how you feel about your members benefiting richly from the handout Obama gave your club compared to the employed who are having their houses foreclosed? It must be nice to have a sugar daddy when you need him. By the way what are doing to help these poor unemployed people? Perhaps you need to put your hand over your mouth when you cough to help the solution my brother.