We can be heroes

I have been looking on as the saga of the miners trapped in the San Jose gold and copper mine, near the city of Copiapo, Chile, unfolds. By current estimates, it will take another four months for the miners to be freed.

Often, in a world of technology, it is easy to forget about the human beings without whom such technology simply couldn’t function. I have commented a number of times in this editorial space about the issue of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The key actors in this media play have seemingly been a huge multinational, embattled CEOs and the government of what is still the most powerful nation in the world.

Yet the engineers who have been working to stop the oil spill, perhaps the real heroes of the piece, and the people who sadly lost their lives working on the rig, have featured very little, and I plead guilty to this omission as much as anyone else.

Bertolt Brecht, perhaps an unlikely person to be featured in a Processingtalk editorial, once wrote a poem entitled A worker reads history. He asked the pertinent question: ’Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?’

In a similar vein, one suspects that when the Chilean miners’ rescue is written up for the history books, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera will be accorded a role (literally and metaphorically) over and above the people beneath the ground trying to free the brave miners. And the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe will be eternally tied to the names of Tony Hayward and Barack Obama.

As Brecht wrote: ’So many particulars. So many questions.’

Lyndon White
Editor, Processingtalk

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