A Slight Contamination

It happened in 1920.

Even as his fellow workers rushed to help him, they knew it was too late.  Later, it would be obvious what had happened, that the ore had contained ice, and that the ice had become steam and that the pressure of that steam had burst the wall of the furnace -- flooding a ladle, in which the young man was working, with 65 tons of molten steel.  But in the chaotic moments before, everyone who understood that anything at all was wrong also understood that there was nothing to be done.  Andy was gone.

538 has done a series of fascinating podcasts around their research into gun death statistics. The detail that jumps out and really punches you, because you've known deep down all along that it's true, is that the number of casualties in this spate of killings, with the police both shooting and being shot by citizens in various states of extreme agitation, is, in the face of the other 30,000 annual American gun deaths, vanishingly small.

The last thing anyone wants to hear, and high among the list of last things anyone wants to say, is that any human death is statistically insignificant. But it might bear mentioning. It seems like the police/black citizen dichotomy might be a spiraling feedback loop of people anticipating statistically unlikely events.  But that's just the opinion of a guy whose hard drive is clogged with an increasingly unmanageable collection of poorly framed and badly lit digital photographs which I am not deleting in case some minute background detail can exonerate me if I am ever falsely accused of murder.

Let me go ahead here and throw myself under the bus. I don't have a job where anyone ever shoots at me. And back in 1996, after my uninsured car caught on fire, I drove around for three months on a suspended license with the limited concern for getting pulled over that can only be enjoyed by a white guy.

The things we want to believe must still be fundamentally true; that cops do not begin their shift looking for a chance to shoot someone. Most police officers retire without discharging their weapons.

The fate of Andrew Posey's mortal remains was now suspended in the empty and contentious space between the wishes of his family and the intentions of U.S. Steel.  His family was desperate to see that Andy, who had just returned from the First World War, was buried in a Catholic cemetery and properly honored.  But to the plant, two things were obvious.  First, there was no feasible way to transport to and bury 65 tons of steel in a traditional cemetery.  Secondly, whatever remained of Andy, the sum total of every mournful atom, amounted to an insignificant impurity which was evenly distributed through a batch of perfectly viable and valuable steel.

The plant, perhaps still suffering the public judgement of the previous year's tense and violent labor strike, acquiesced to a compromise and buried the entire heat along a rail spur on the edge of the U.S. Steel's property. A brother built a memorial. In death, Andy came to embody the human cost of progress.

The takeaway of the 538 podcast series isn't particularly hopeful, aside from being relieved of the burden of thinking that there is some practical course of action. Even the subset of gun victims that are most easily forecasted, women who are killed in domestic disputes by previously convicted partners, are dependant on their eventual assailants to self-report that they are complying with the prohibition of gun ownership. 

We have no move. The rare events attract news coverage, which they should. The coverage outrages citizens, which it should. The outrage eventually gives way to constructive dialog that wouldn't otherwise have a forum or sufficient gravity.

The guys who post and tweet that they are right behind you in the checkout line with a loaded gun, protecting you and insuring that they themselves will not die while crying and pleading for their lives, yeah...well, they're right.  They're going to go the same way most of us do -- attached to an array of gurgling and hissing tubes, providing a data point for some grad student who has invested himself in the eventual eradication of whatever precise thing is currently killing us. And that grad student will be obsessed with that particular style of death until the day he inadvertently steps in front of a speeding furniture truck.

The engine of civilization, which is the sum total of every every person who has ever lived, is strangely indifferent toward human beings. In fact, it may be humanity's greatest adversary.  It may be up there with rogue asteroids and super volcanoes, way high on the list -- twelve slots above pathogens and shark attacks.

It happened again in 1995.

An impending sale of the mill property invited the question of what was to be done with the grave.  It was historically significant, evocative and unique.  In the time since the burial, mythology has arisen around the events of 1920 and there were rumors that the steel had been reclaimed during World War II.

Every sample taken from the site of the Andrew Posey memorial revealed that it was sitting on top of at least eight feet of virgin, undisturbed, never-not-once-excavated earth. There was no steel here. There never had been.

Andy was gone.