One Life at a Time

by Eric Francis Coppolino, October 28, 2010

Finally, a bit of good news here in the Anti-Sixties, after a year featuring various scenarios of apocalypse, environmental devastation, and intolerance: After more than two months of nonstop work, an international team successfully brought 33 Chilean miners safely home from half a mile beneath the Earth. I stayed up half the night watching, one by one, as the men emerged from beneath the ground in a little capsule, and were greeted by loved ones, the president, and his wife. It was better than the Beatles.

In the anxious times we’re living through, this is a triumph of humanity, even though the problem was created by the people who run a massive corporation hiring people to dig for gold under extremely dangerous conditions. This was not a natural disaster. But the solution represented humanity at its best.

We could fault the worldwide vigil around the rescue as a feel-good event, but I daresay that’s what the world needs now: to actually feel good about life and love rather than the stock market or “American Idol.” We do a lot of getting pissed off and most of that involves how little regard is afforded to the worth of life. Watching those guys come out of the rescue pod one by one, and embrace their families, it was impossible not to appreciate being alive, right then, on the spot.

Yes, we can even feel good about humanity’s ability to cooperate at doing something helpful. There was a time those men would have been left for dead, even if some effort might have saved them. Part of what did save them was publicity—you’re always safer near a TV camera, unless it’s hidden in the ladies’ room. The drilling experts, engineers, submarine scientists, geologists, and (actual) rocket scientists got the guys out. The doctors and psychologists on the surface actually seem to have offered some significant help.

Yet in reality it was the miners themselves who kept it together under some strange, extreme circumstances, rationing teaspoons of food and cups of milk for the first 17 days on the verge of starvation. They organized work tasks based on their specialties, keeping their living space clean, digging wells for fresh water and most of all, getting along. Or rather—getting along, eventually. Apparently the sanitized account of events has left out the at-times intense conflict that they experienced, and their darker thoughts of waiting to die during those first 17 days.