Lot of déjà vu lately. I keep hoping we’ll build on this
weird monster we have now, this internet. Because apparently, satellite news available
around the world, 24-7-365 in every timezone, just isn’t educational enough.
But some things just keep happening in the world, even
when spectacular examples force us as humans to learn how to prevent them.
Let’s start with fires in night clubs. Up to 234 dead in
Santa Maria as I write, according to the BBC. Certainly more than died in that Rhode
Island fire in 2003, known as the Station Fire. A hundred dead, ten years ago,
for exactly the same reason: indoor fireworks, no fireproofing, too many
people, not enough exits.
Did you notice ‘ten years ago’? Do you remember how much
coverage this got? It made international news. I’ll bet the guys who ran the
club, and who ran the town of Santa Maria knew about it. The band might not
have. They were still children when it happened.
Meanwhile, another worker fire in India. Or was it
Pakistan? They were all the same country once, so for this matter, I don’t
care. I do care that America had the Triangle Fire over a hundred years ago,
yet these continue to happen in the corner-cutting operations around the world,
wherever poverty is leveraged by cheap bastards.
And the common thing in the concert fires and the worker
fires…other than fire, of course, is the incredible greediness of the owners of
the businesses. Can’t take a chance on someone getting in free through a side
door, or sneaking out for some air during a shift. Far cheaper to lock every
door but one than to hire people to watch additional doors. Or as we like to
call them, ‘Fire Exits’.
And then there’s the amazing pollution in China that we’ve
been seeing pictures of. Looks like LA in the sixties and seventies in the
summer, or Denver in the winter, or a dozen other major American cities back
then. Which is why we have the EPA. And catalytic converters, and stack
scrubbers, and monitoring, and fines. And those are part of the reason why you
haven’t seen pictures like this from American cities lately. Except it took
years from when we knew what to do until when we could get it done. Why? Greedy
bastards who were afraid their profit margin on cars or coal or electricity or
gasoline would be sucked up by cleaning up after themselves. As usual, wrong.
But how many died before we learned?
Like the intro to an old TV show went, “we have
the technology, we have the capability...” We just don’t have the sense to use
it. That’s the species ‘we’, not the nationalist ‘we’.
Of course, there’s plenty that we could learn from the better
results other countries have from their health insurance systems and their gun
laws, for example. From the storm barriers the English and the Dutch already
have to prevent things like Hurricane Sandy from decimating a city or a
country.
And then there’s how we treat each other. I won’t even
get into what we should have learned about war. But when someone points at how
much better we Westerners treat women than some other countries do, I remind
them it’s only a matter of inches. Only the number of inches of leg a woman
shows in public before it’s her fault, because ‘she was asking for it.’
So much we still have to learn, as a species, in order to do
a better job of being stewards of the land, and our brothers’ keepers and all
that.
You’d think the things some of us have gotten right, the
rest of us would get on board with.
You’d think.
And you’d be different from most.
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