Invisible Casualties
by Paul Loeb
Dissident Voice
September 8, 2002
The ordeal of the trapped Pennsylvania coal miners may be
yesterday's headlines, but for a moment, their lives seemed connected with
ours. We imagined ourselves imprisoned underground as the water slowly rose and
rescuers raced to break through. We hoped they could hang on, huddled together
in the dark. Their deliverance seemed a miraculous reprieve, as if the World
Trade Center attacks had somehow been averted. But it also made me
wonder--while a president who'd cut mine safety budgets embraced the men for
the cameras--about those whose injuries and deaths are invisible, whose stories
Disney will never tell. How do we decide whose lives we should care about?
The miners aren't the only Americans who place themselves
at daily risk in their jobs. In a typical year, six thousand workers die from
fatal occupational injuries, and fifty thousand from occupational illnesses
like asbestosis, brown lung, and workplace-linked cancers. Six million get
injured. We don't talk about these people much. Their lives are invisible, far
from the media pundits. They're often the immigrants and the poor, those most
disposable in our culture. Colorado Republicans even passed a recent law
limiting workplace compensation for losing an arm to $36,000, and $2,000 for
"serious permanent disfigurement." And when the Bush administration
gutted ergonomics standards that took decades to craft, they assured us the
consequences were minimal.
Imagine, though, if the daily workplace deaths and injuries
were front and center on the nightly network news. Imagine if we took each
instance to heart, the way we did with the ordeal of the threatened miners. To
be sure, their story had every conceivable element of drama-unlike workplace
injury statistics. But most of us rarely even glimpse what it means to go in
each day jeopardizing life and health to put food on the table, just as we see
little of what it's like to struggle to get by without adequate healthcare,
housing, or education. These stories get erased from our national consciousness
before even surfacing, like the vanished history in George Orwell's 1984. We
never feel the weight of the shattered lives.
Distancing by invisibility happens even more with global
life-and-death issues. Thirty thousand people die every day of hunger-related
causes worldwide-the equivalent of nearly ten World Trade Center attacks.
According to the respected hunger advocacy group Bread for the World, a yearly
appropriation of $13 billion would meet their basic health and nutrition needs
and save their lives. That's about what America spends on pet food, or a
thirtieth of Bush's $400-billion-dollar defense budget. We could also cover
this amount seven times with the yearly cost of the recent tax cuts for the
wealthiest one in a hundred Americans.
But of course we don't do this. Instead, we pull back from
every international aid program conceivable, and when we do participate, ensure
that the global poor pay so much for what they receive that many can never even
participate. We do this, with barely a shred of real debate, in part so men
like the Enron and WorldCom executives can keep every dollar they grab, deeming
that privilege more important than the right of children to eat.
You'd think that so many preventable deaths would shock us.
They would if we felt their full human impact. But we get little chance to do
so. The Pennsylvania miners felt real to us, because we saw their families,
heard their stories, and got a sense of them as human beings with lives as
weighty, worthy, and complex as our own. They weren't just statistics. We don't
get that close to those who starve halfway around the world. They remain
faceless and anonymous, and our media and our political leaders choose not to
make their lives a priority. Nor do most of us even glimpse the daily risks
taken by those who work dangerous and life-destroying jobs here at home. It's
easier to not look too closely at their lives. Their stories seldom affect us
the way the stories of the miners did.
Without this emotional connection, it becomes easy to deny
the human toll of the actions we allow to be taken in our common name. We may
shrug our shoulders and say we don't know what to do. When we acknowledge the
needless deaths at all, we'll often treat them as inevitable tragedy:
"Children are always dying in Africa." Sometimes we'll even blame the
victims for their fate. If workers die because employers speed up assembly
lines, work them too many hours, or fail to repair dangerous machines, they
must simply have been careless. It's a little harder to do this with dying
children, but we have no shortage of pundits who blame the moral character of
countries whose treasuries have been drained dry by years of Western-supported
dictators and crippling debt payments. As psychologist Edward Opton once wrote
about America's rationalizations for the My Lai massacre "It didn't happen
and besides they deserved it."
The courage of the Pennsylvania miners and of their
rescuers rightly inspires us. But their story should also lead us to ask some
difficult questions. How are we connected with our fellow human beings,
including those who risk their health and lives for our benefit? What does it mean
to make so many people routinely expendable in the name of progress, the
market, and the American way of life? What would it take to treat the stories
of all whose lives are needlessly jeopardized as seriously as we did these
trapped miners? These may not be easy questions to answer. But if we value the
lives of these men who we thought were lost but now, astonishingly, are saved,
they're questions we ought to start asking.
Paul
Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a
Cynical Time
and
three other books on citizen involvement.