Duty to Warn

As this is written, everyone wounded in the terror bombings at the Boston Marathon has survived his or her wounds. This remarkable testament to effective medical response stems largely from Boston’s exceptional health-care capacity.

But as demonstrated by the fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, the chaos wreaked by Superstorm Sandy, the shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., and the horrible gun violence that savages Chicago, every community must ask if it has the capacity to answer emergencies. And in South Chicago and other neglected poor communities, the answer is surely no.

The remarkable response in Boston was exemplary, but unique. The bombs exploded at a site — the finish line of the Boston Marathon — staffed by emergency medical services personnel and other first responders. Six trauma centers were within a few minutes of the finish line. Those hospitals were prepared to treat dehydrated runners. Several had surgeons and other clinicians familiar with blast injuries from their service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On April 15, 29 year-old Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, 23 and Martin Richard, 8, left home to watch runners cross the finish line in the Boston Marathon. They and their families thought they would return that day as always. But they never did. As the world now knows, Krystle, Lu and Martin were killed and 170 other people were shattered by bombs that day.

Also in Massachusetts, Giuseppe Cracchiola and David Frank, Sr. went to work on January 28, as did Jose Roldan the following day. They and their families thought they would come home that night as always. But they never did. Giuseppe, David, Jose and 60 other people in Massachusetts were killed and over 80,000 people were injured on the job in 2011, the last full year for which official statistics are available. Nationally, the numbers hard to believe: 18 deaths and over 11,000 injuries on the job every work day.

Startling, heartbreaking deaths every one. And yet, people of good will might consider these comparisons.

It was terror that shook the nation. On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb exploded in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Four little girls, all dressed in white — 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, and 11-year-old Denise McNair — died in the explosion, and are remembered in history.

Congress now is considering offering them posthumously a Congressional Gold Medal.

But there was a fifth little girl caught in the blast — 10-year-old Sarah Collins Rudolph — the younger sister of Addie Mae. Partly blinded, she staggered from the basement bleeding from the nose and ears from a concussion. She spent two months in the hospital, but she survived. To this day, she bears her injuries, and the traumatic stress that does not go away. She doesn’t want a medal; she wants justice.

Now she is speaking out, witness to that horrible crime in those mean days. She’s angry because her sister’s body has been lost. When they went to exhume the body, the grave contained someone else’s remains. She wonders why there was no compensation for her injuries, no help for the families.

After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country’s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion -- and reflexive “doublethink,” which George Orwell described as willingness “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.”

In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesday’s front page: “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say.” The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, “rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast.”

Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of “combined effects munitions” when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting.

The bitter battle over two stricken southern California reactors has taken a shocking seismic hit.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ignored critical questions from two powerful members of Congress just as the Government Accountability Office has seriously questioned emergency planning at the San Onofre nuclear plant.

At a cost of some $770 million, Southern California Edison and its partners installed faulty steam generators at San Onofre Units 2 and 3 that have failed and leaked.

Those reactors have been been shut since January, 2012 (similar defects doomed Unit 1 in 1992).

They've generated zero electricity, but SCE and its partners have billed ratepayers over a billion dollars for them.

SCE wants San Onofre reopened by June 1. The idea is to experiment with Unit 2 at 70% of full power for five months, despite widespread concerns that the defective generators will fail again.

That would require a license amendment, about which the NRC staff has asked Edison 32 key preliminary questions. But there’s been no official, adjudicated public hearing on Edison’s response.

In the not so distant future, America’s skies will be full of . . . drones.

What could go wrong?

“Although the prospect of drones flying over U.S. cities is generating cries of spies in the skies,” writes the Los Angeles Times, “groups from California to Florida are fiercely competing to become one of six federally designated sites for testing how the remotely piloted aircraft can safely be incorporated into the nation’s airspace.”

It’s just technology and technology is neutral, or so the forces of mainstream capitalism assure us. Drones are an emerging market, with worldwide sales expected to double in the next decade, to $11 billion, if not much more. And these will be good drones, the kind that look for lost children or leaks in pipelines, the kind that catch criminals.

What disturbs me about all this — what feels utterly unexamined in the mainstream coverage of this looming techno-makeover of our world — is:

A. Why is there such an emerging market for drones?