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President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard
President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard
The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion. Wearing your respirator and other PPE will go a long way towards mitigating these risks, but they’re not the most pleasant things to wear for hours on end. He told me that lots of younger guys would come in, start working and see all the old guys at it with their respirators on, but they’d opt not to wear them whenever they thought they could get away with it, since they didn’t personally know people who developed black lung in the field. That’s just what he had told me, so I couldn’t say how accurate it really is, but given the attitudes I’ve seen from guys in other fields towards wearing all their PPE, it wouldn’t really surprise me if it were largely true.
Sounds a lot like the general population when it comes to vaccine efficacy, too. I cannot tell you how many people have told me, since about the 90s, when the denialism really started to get underway, that “I didn’t vaccinate my kids and they never got sick!”
/facepalm
I remember talking to my retired grandmother, who worked her entire life as a nurse, about these experiences while she was still alive, and she had zero fucking patience for that shit, since she was of a generation that saw the effects of many of these diseases. It positively enraged her, if you want to be honest. And she was very right to be mad.
This PPE thing is rather exasperating to hear about, too, but at least people are not putting others, including their own children, at risk, I guess…
You beat me to it. People flocked to that stuff when everyone knew someone who had been afflicted with a preventable malady, but once many of those problems are solved you eventually have a group of people who grew up not knowing anyone who had them and it is easy for them to question why the regulations that prevented them in the first place are needed.
I mean I heard of things like tuberculosis, and measles and other diseases as a kid, but I never knew anyone who had them… because where I was living everyone was aggressively vaccinated for them and it was seen as a disease of the past. We even had widespread smallpox vaccines even though smallpox was literally extinct in the wild almost a decade before I was born.
I remember some of the science/skeptic type of podcasts/blogs I listened to/read in the mid-00s often referencing the fact that vaccines are truly the victims of their own success. I think they are quite right from what I see and what is easily explainable human nature when it comes to risk assessment.
Sadly, I think it might take something like the current measles outbreak to disabuse these people of their lunacy. I’m Gen X, so I don’t know that too much of this really took root with most of us, though we didn’t really see much of these diseases first-hand either, but we did hear horror stories from older family members (I mentioned my grandmother elsewhere in this thread, but my mother was also a nurse and thought the antivaxxer phenomenon was sheer insanity, too). Though Jenny McCarthy is Gen X, sooooo…it seems at least some of our generation fell for it.
I think it might be the mid/younger Gen X/millennials that this kind of thing really began with. I doubt too many boomers or older X’ers really fell completely for the anti-vaxxer stuff, at least when raising their kids. I think not seeing first-hand, or at least hearing about, some of the terrors of these diseases from relatives you trust really does have an effect. Sometimes seeing something really does have an impact.
To compare it to something else - I remember older people and teachers telling us kids about 17 year cicadas. I think I didn’t exactly disbelieve them, but it seemed really, really hard to imagine it to be the scale they claimed. It seemed like the older generations were exaggerating or maybe pulling your leg just a bit. Really? These things are everywhere, making all this noise? Until it happens.
There is little that can really prepare you for something like that, until you live through it. I think a lot of things in life might be like 17-year cicadas, including the fact that horrifying, awful diseases lie just beyond, waiting for the day when vaccination levels are not sufficiently high to keep herd immunity…and that younger generations sometimes have to actually listen to older generations.