When crime pays.
When we speak of crime and violence, we immediately think of shootings and stabbings--of Saturday Night Specials and the meat cleaver caked with blood--for it is the sudden, forceful and brutal infliction of painful physical injury that is the object of our deepest fears. If a liquor store clerk is shot to death in a robbery, we have no doubt that a violent crime has been committed. But when people are needlessly crippled or killed by their working and living conditions; when working men and women die of brown lung disease caused by exposure to cotton dust in textile mills; when innocent children are killed in automobile accidents from injuries that could have been prevented by automatic safety systems; when people could have been rescued from conditions of intolerable deprivation but are left to the "silent killers" of hunger, cold and sickness--their pain and loss is no less attributable to human action. Yet we shrink from recognizing this infliction of human suffering as a form of violence.
Is there a profound difference between the deaths that result from the hazards of the work place--corporate indifference to the sickness and fatalities that result from exposure to cotton dust or asbestos fibers, untested drugs, or Radon gas--and the deaths caused by common criminals?
Let's talk about all this at the next SLP Portland meeting at the Central Library, Saturday, June 10th, 10 AM - 11:30. Please join us at our "Learning Sessions."
Sincerely,
Sid Fink, Organizer