There are certain occasions which are imprinted on our memories so strongly that we never forget where we were when they happened. For me, some of the dates which stand out are when Pope John Paul II was shot, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and the date Concorde came down in Paris. 9/11 goes without saying! There are good times too of course, such as the breaking through of the Berlin Wall, and that evening when I first met my wife-to-be (which can’t go without saying).
Today takes me back to December 3, 1984, driving my 1972 Chevy Nova back from seeing the governor of California at the cinema in the film Terminator. I turned on the radio to hear the news that at 10:00 AM California time, midnight in Bhopal, India, a pesticide production plant owned by Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical), suffered a release of large amounts of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. To avoid too much detail here about a horrible tragedy, I will just summarize with some facts. More than 500,000 people were exposed. The death toll from hospital records is put at around 20,000 – and that’s not even considering the destroyed families, lives, resultant diseases and birth-defects.
The court cases continue to this day, as does the suffering. Go and do a simple search for yourselves. Put the one word “Bhopal” in a search engine. I have purposely not provided a link to any article here because it is impossible for one link I might choose to properly convey the price paid by the victims. They aren’t the only ones who have paid of course – Union Carbide has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, and no doubt their shareholders have felt that pain very severely.
It is somewhat stomach-churning that we can use the words “paid” and “pain” to describe both what the shareholders felt, as well as what the local population felt – and continues to feel.
I don’t know all the facts of course, and I’m not in a position to properly decide specific blame and compensation. But it is obvious even to the most casual observer what the main problem is.
Why would anyone build a pesticide plant in a developing country, in a highly-populated, poverty-ridden area?
I think we all know the answer. The main price of progress is always paid by those too poor and powerless to stand up for their interests. The rich and powerful pretty much do what they want, when they want, and use Jeremy Bentham’s argument of the Utilitarian economists (“the largest benefit for the largest number”) as their excuse.
And there we have it. Large institutions pursuing the financial bottom-line, assigning some complex financial calculation to lives and health – in which the lives and interests of the poor and powerless are assigned a very low value indeed.
Here at GoHuman, we believe a life, or someone’s health, cannot be assigned a price. We recognize the sad fact that the human aspect of business tends to decline as the size of a business grows. That is why we promote our services to support smaller businesses. Businesses where a relationship with customers and community are critical success factors. Businesses where reputation is placed above immediate profit. Businesses that GoHuman because they are human. Businesses like yours.
Have a look at GoHuman.com. We think you’ll like what you see!
