A tale of two explosions

By Max J. Castro

MIAMI – Two lethal explosions took place on the same day last week.

You would have to live on another planet to have missed the horror that happened at the end of the Boston Marathon after bombs allegedly placed by a pair of young brothers of Chechen origin detonated, killing three people, including a small child, and severely injuring scores of others.

The Boston bombing was an act of murder and, like all terrorist attacks, cowardly and utterly lacking justification. This time, however, the cruel carnage even defies explanation.
Chechen terrorists have carried out some unspeakable crimes, including one targeting dozens of schoolchildren – in Russia. The fact that Russia carried out savage wars against Chechen secessionists in which many civilians died in no way justifies the vile actions of Chechen terrorists against innocent Russian civilians. But it does provide the motive.

But the United States generally has been highly critical instead of supportive of Russia’s actions vis-à-vis the Chechens. So why target this country? I am not the only one scratching his head. A veteran journalist for the Voice of America who has covered the region for many years admitted on National Public Radio that he was totally baffled, especially because Chechen terrorists have never struck outside Russia.

The other deadly explosion that took place last week was at a fertilizer factory in Texas. This tragedy was not a deliberate act of murder or terror. Still, it did take the lives of many more people than were killed in Boston – at least fourteen and probably more – while injuring as many as 200.

Reading The Miami Herald the next day, I became curious as to how the media would cover each of these stories. The Herald did carry both events on the front page. The Boston story, however, was displayed in large headlines and received prime, above-the-fold, placement. The Texas story had smaller headlines and was carried below the fold. And while the story on the Boston bombing continued on page 2, the remainder of the Texas piece appeared on page 12.

I followed up with a search of both stories on Google news. The search for “Boston Marathon Bomb” yielded an astronomical number of hits: 1,810,000,000. That’s almost two billion. A search for “Texas fertilizer plant explosion” produced a very large number of hits too: 1,430,000, or 1.43 million. That’s big, but still it is less than a tenth the number of hits for the other story.

There are many understandable reasons for this disparity, but what is clear is that the toll in death and suffering isn’t one of them. For starters, the Boston Marathon is the granddaddy of modern marathons and an international sporting event held in a big city attracting tremendous media attention. The Texas fertilizer plant is in the town of West, Texas, in other words, in the middle of nowhere. The people who work there don’t receive much attention or acclaim.

Moreover, Boston was a rare event: the only rough precedent for a terrorist attack of this kind happened more than four decades ago at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Herein lays a crucial difference. In the United States, death on the job is not a rare event. It happens every day: mining explosions, construction mishaps, oil platform fires, and more. Of course, the Boston Marathon attack was different in that it was a deliberate terrorist crime. Such acts generate a high level of moral outrage, public attention, and outright panic.
On the other hand, can deaths on the job or because of occupational illnesses resulting from the job, which each year kill far more Americans than died on 9/11 and all other terrorist attacks in the following dozen years combined, be written off as mere unavoidable accidents undeserving of media focus and public outrage?    

They shouldn’t. The fact is that while no expense is spared and no holds barred when there is a terrorist attack or even a threat, enforcement of occupational health and safety laws is pathetic. The plant in Texas was cited by the EPA in 2006 for not having an adequate risk management plan. The penalty was a $3,200 fine. With such meager sanctions, corporations can afford to consider fines as the cost of doing business.

Many do. They have been aided and abetted by Republican administrations that have starved of resources the agencies responsible for worker safety and health and appointed people to head them who have spent their careers advocating for the very industries they have been charged to regulate. That’s just one more component of the top-down class war the GOP has been waging for decades. The fact that some of the worst corporate offenders give big campaign contributions to members of Congress makes matters worse.

The death of one of the suspects in the Boston bombing and the apprehension of the other came quickly. The great energy and massive resources devoted by government to the manhunt was probably an important factor. The outcome raises hopes that other would-be terrorist will be deterred.

The same cannot be said for the West, Texas, industrial explosion. The case will probably drag on for years and it is unlikely anyone will be severely punished. Meanwhile entire industries will go on ruining lives and wrecking bodies and very few people will be paying attention.