What Are They Thinking?

Let me get this straight. The air was tested safe minutes before a Massey mine exploded and killed 29 miners and ripped at the soul of a big chunk of West Virginia.

Let me try to wrap my head around that explanation. The tools said everything was hunky dory minutes before an explosion unleashed gas that remained for days in lethal concentrations.

What I hear at that report is a jingle in my head. "Everybody's doing it, doing it, doing it. Everybody's doing it, doing it, too."

That sort of explains it all for me. For example, it is how this entire economic meltdown has been explained. Isn't it? As I grasp it, because Everybody was playing with Everybody else's money the very fact that everybody was doing it made it impossible to allow it to stop happening. If one collapsed they all collapsed.

That's it, right? Everybody doing it, doing it ....

It even explains the 401K set-up to the meltdown, another thing I never fully fathomed. Once that first company abandoned its pension plan to instead use those retirement funds to dabble in the stock market, it wasn't a blink of an eye before everybody was doing it. Within less than five years pensions were anachronisms and everyone employed knew the code words, 401K.

"Everybody's doing it," accompanies the shrugs of dismissal. As if responsibility were no more within our control than the weather. As if responsibility was beyond human reach. If things break, well, they will be replaced.

Which brings round another rhyme in my head. "All the kings horses and all the kings men can't put Humpty together again."

Now that seems to more accurately explain what happened at the mine in West Virginia.