The eCrozier

I grew up on the edge of coal country. I spent three of my college summers working in the heart of coal country. I saw the human consequences of a life in the mines: hunched over men who were continually coughing up coal dust from their lungs. Last year, when the Upper Big Branch mine had a methane gas explosion killing 29 miners, we soon learned that the owner of the mine, Massey Energy, had a long history of safety violations. I learned from my friends in West Virginia that those violations were an open secret, but since coal was king there, money so powerful, and other options for work so scarce, just about everyone looked the other way.

Earlier this week, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued its final report on the event clearly blaming Massey Energy for putting production ahead of safety. The MSHA named systematic, intentional and aggressive efforts by Massey Energy to avoid compliance with safety laws. U.S. Attorney, Booth Goodwin, also announced the largest settlement ever in a coalmine disaster: $210 million. He added that the Department of Justice was somewhat hamstrung because they had limited ways to punish a corporation, implying the settlement was the best they could do. He said, referring to Massey Energy: “It is not a life. It is not a being. It can’t go to jail.”

But now I am confused. I thought our Supreme Court, when talking about money in politics, decided corporations were people, having the same rights of free speech. 29 husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons died in what amounted to negligent homicide. They can’t have it both ways. Corporations can’t be people when it comes to unlimited money in politics, but then not be people when it comes to the deaths of 29 miners. The Tea Party Movement, the Occupy Movement, and others speaking out are all clear expressions of people’s frustrations and anger that wealth and power inoculates people from facing justice. As Judy Jones Petersen, a Charleston physician whose brother died in the explosion, said: “Justice is not if you have enough money to pay off your heinous acts then you may go free. And that’s what’s happening here. They have enough money, they have the wherewithal, and mind you, it’s done on the backs of people whose lives were lost, but they have enough money to pay away their sins.”

Dr. Peterson, maybe unconsciously, was echoing John the Baptist. Like Dr. Peterson,  John the Baptist called out the “Brood of Vipers” who were oppressing others and thus gaining greater wealth and power. John’s only solution for them was to repent, thus changing their whole way of acting in the world. Repentance is changing your life in order to see the world through God’s merciful, compassionate, and just eyes. And that is our only solution as well. We can never “have enough money to pay away our sins.”

Just as with the financiers whose despicable behavior nearly led to the collapse of our economy and cost the jobs and pensions of millions of people, my hunch is no one from Massey Energy will ever spend even one day confined to a jail cell (yet sometimes the repentance of a penitent calls for a penitentiary). Is it any wonder why so many people are either apathetic about our society or so angry they do not know what to do next?

+Scott