Once More into the Depths

When Jesus died, so the Gospels say, they shut him up in a cave. He descended into hell. On the third day, his disciples found the stone to his tomb rolled away. He had risen, defeated death, stepped from the darkness into the light.

When the families of 12 miners trapped in a Sago, W.Va., coal mine found out last week that their loved ones had not survived, after being mistakenly told that they had, it was a cruel inversion of the resurrection story. For about three hours, their husbands, fathers and sons were, in their minds, brought back to life. Then they died again.

The families' grief and rage are hardly surprising. But it is not callous to wonder why—besides simple compassion—this story, like cave-in and child-down-a-well stories in the past, moved America to hold an electronic vigil. Soldiers are killed in Iraq, for instance, every week. They are no less brave, and their families grieve no less. But until the total reaches some grim round number, the stories recede from the front page and the top of the evening newscast.

Mining, however, is a different kind of danger, and its disasters take us not just out of our routine but out of our time. The men—and they are still mostly men—risk explosion or asphyxiation, to say nothing of cancer and emphysema, not for a principle or a geopolitical end but to put food on the table. They hark back to Dickensian, even prehistoric times, when making a living meant chancing death.

The reminder that some people still do this—and that heating our houses and charging our iPods depends on it—is even more arresting now that such tragedies have become rarer. Particularly when so many Americans work in sterile, comfortable, safe environments, attention must be paid to those who don't. As the son of one dead miner told the New York Times, "He gave his life in there so I could go to the movies."

Then again, on Sept. 11, 2001, almost 3,000 people died because they showed up at comfortable, safe jobs as secretaries, traders and flight attendants. For a brief cultural moment, 9/11 turned average Americans into coal miners; that is, it suddenly became plausible to ask, "If I die today doing this job, will it have been worth it?" But unlike the the horror of 9/11, when millions watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center on live TV, a mine collapse is horrifying for the opposite reason: we see nothing and hear nothing. A group of men is either alive or dead and—in this age of GPS locators, instant messaging and Google Earth—thousands of feet of antediluvian rock stand between us and knowing their fate.

We are used to getting instant information, if not instant understanding, these days: we get mid-surgery updates on Ariel Sharon, we track hurricanes in real time by computer. But after the explosion at Sago, we knew little more than we would have had it occurred 100 years ago. The machinery of electronic media could only fill the airtime in useless agitation, finally exploding in a burst of false "Miracle!" reports.