Our country, specifically those in the mining and oil industries, experienced horrible catastrophes recently. Men who have much more dangerous jobs that I, ended up dyeing due to accidents or explosions.
Both of these stories are tragic. The lose of American lives while hard at work in freak accidents. What is interesting is the response from the media and politicians. With the mining accident, all of the focus was on the lives of those lost. The President even attended a large ceremony in their honor. In the oil rig accident however, very little has been said about those that died. Don’t they deserve the same respect?
Furthermore, I have seen much discussion from the left, saying that we should never be drilling offshore and this is proof of that. I even saw a sign from a protestor at a congressional hearing that said “spill, babu, spill” (mocking the previous “drill, baby, drill”). Does this make any sense at all? Because of one accident (regardless of the size) that we should just stop production completely? If this is how we operated everything, we would not drive in cars, fly in planes, ride a bike, produce food, or just about anything else.
Just because there is an accident (or a mistake), you don’t just stop. You learn from it, make improvements, and move forward.
The oil spill is a major problem, no question about that. We need to put all of the resources we have forward to protect the gulf, the wildlife, and the beaches, but we also need to be smart about what happens next. Work to determain what caused the accident, find ways to make it less likely to happen again and move forward.