Monday, November 30, 2009
However you choose to keep score in the game of life (possessions, sexual conquests, etc.) it will impress only others who keep score the same way.
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I am so tired of hearing "perfect storm" of whatever applied to everything. I hear "perfect storm of this", "perfect storm of that" at least five times every day! Hey folks, it's done. Over. Finished. No longer an interesting turn of phrase. It's just plain annoying.
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I am surprised by how many young people have never heard of the
Bhopal Union Carbide disaster. It happened 25 years ago as of next Thursday, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that 35-year-olds don't know.
It was and still is the largest manufacturing disaster in written history. Different sources quote different numbers, but somewhere around 4,000 sleeping people were killed immediately by the gas leak, followed by another 11,000 over the next few weeks. Approximately 300,000 survivors were badly damaged, left with destroyed kidneys, livers, lungs, nervous systems, many eventually dying of their conditions. The luckiest ones were only blinded.
Since then, children born to survivors suffer birth defects in various degrees, everything from retardation, to microcephalus and other nerve damage, to paralysis. (These are poor people, with no insurance.) The enviromental damage has never been cleaned up - the water is poisoned.
Union Carbide has fought the lawsuits. The Indian government sued for a few billion. Union Carbide offered to settle for $350 million, the amount of their liability insurance. Quoting Wikipedia, "In 1989, a settlement was reached under which UCC agreed to pay US$470 million (the insurance sum, plus interest) in a full and final settlement of its civil and criminal liability.
" It was "take it or leave it, we'll fight this forever."
The movie "The Yes Men Save the World" (I watched it a few weeks ago) points out that Dow Chemical, who purchased Union Carbide in 2001, paid out several
billion to four or five Texans injured in a chemical spill a few years ago, but feels no compulsion to honor UC's moral debts in India.
Boston.com's
Big Picture set this week is Bhopal, twenty-five years later, but I'm not sure the choice of photo subjects was very effective. There's a surfeit of rusting tanks and machinery, and a dearth of human aftereffects, and that's the big story.
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Some of the comments on the photo set are interesting.
Commenter #17 points out that this kind of disaster occurs with distressing regularity in less developed areas, but not in this country, and so he wants to put the blame on lax governmental regulations, corrupt officials, and low work standards. In other words, it's India's fault.
Commenter #19 rejoins that corporations know that if they
can get away with risking people's lives, it makes economic sense for them to do so, so they do. Union Carbide could have followed the same safety procedures they implement here, but they didn't, by choice.
I have to agree with commenter #19.
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BTW - Bhopal is not a tiny village out in the countryside somewhere. It's a city of 1.5 million.
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I am sitting here going slowly crazy.
I have some kind of minor condition where a repetitive motion at a certain speed can put me in a near trance. A rotating ceiling fan can make it very difficult for me to concentrate. Flashing sunlight between equidistant tree trunks along the road make my eyes lock.
A repeating sound has the opposite effect. I tense up, get mean, and want to explode.
Someone clicking a ballpoint pen, or doing that tap-rolling the fingernails on the table thing in a meeting is liable to find me at his throat. Ex#2 used to get something going with his nose where it clicked on every inhalation.
For some reason, this house amplifies some sounds. Maybe because it's set in bedrock on a ridge. Maybe just because it's high. Maybe it's that the west wall is mostly glass. The railroad tracks are at least two miles away, but sometimes you can "feel" the trains go by (and those are passenger trains, not freight). There was a bagpipe band that used to practice in (inside!) a firehouse 15 miles away as the crow flies, across the river, but I could hear them inside the house. Couldn't hear them outside, just inside.
Well, something is going "thrump thrump thrump" somewhere outside, at the rate of 90 thrumps per minute. Steady. No variation. No pause. For the past hour! I have a radio on here in the den, and one in the living room, and one in the kitchen, all tuned to NPR, and even with the volume up high I can still hear the thrumps. I went outside and I can barely hear it in the front of the house, and not at all in the back, where all the glass is. It seems to be coming from somewhere to the north.
Right now my back and jaw are tensed and I want to kill something!
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Full set at http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/05/another_icelandic_eruption_gri.html.
