They deserve their place under the sun..

You can’t have escaped the enormous media spectacle around those Chilean miners. For more than a day BBC world and a couple of other big 24h newschannels aired nothing else. Ok, we get it, it’s a big thing. For these miners and their families. We’re happy for them.

They went through a terrible ordeal, yes no doubt. But for every miner that went through this terrible ordeal, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are going through an ordeal of their own, without light at the end of the tunnel in the form of lucrative deals and a hero’s welcome.

Are they hero’s?
A hero is someone who puts his life in danger voluntarily, in order to safe someone else. Now, since we don’t know what happened down there, it’s entirely possible that there were a few hero’s in that mine, having endangered themselves to save some of the others.

But otherwise, the accident is something that happened to them, a terrible ordeal yes, but hero’s because of it? If anyone involuntarily undergoing a terrible ordeal is a hero, than yes. But you’ll find there are quite a bit more hero’s out there, hero’s who overwhelmingly suffer in silence.

Speaking of which, how about that poor miner’s wife that had to endure the humiliation of having to see her freshly rescued husband in the arms of his mistress instead of her’s?

Basically, once you’re down in a mine, anything can happen so you could call them hero’s for putting their lives in danger. But to call them hero’s you would have to call each and every miner (especially those Chinese ones, as the safety record of Chinese mines is much worse) who goes down a mine a hero.

So here’s to those unsung Chinese miners!

And although we highly respect all miners, they generally go down a mine not to put their lives in danger to rescue someone else, but to earn a living. They’re still hero’s for us but it doesn’t fit the description.

So it could be us, but we think the media hype was a tad overdone…