Shaking
Thursday is overcast, gray. The wind is gusting, a gentle breeze by comparison to the 60 mph winds of last night. December, tornado season?
Mayfield, Kentucky. It appears that a giant blender descended from the sky, churning to rubble neighborhoods and buildings… The candle factory, ranked as Graves County’s third-largest private employer, is gone. The company paid employees a starting wage of $8.00 per hour. Eight workers died when the storm struck the factory. I cannot imagine dying for $8.00 an hour. Neither could they.
Subsequent to the death of these people, ownership published this statement.
In a statement on the company’s website this weekend, Troy Propes wrote: “Our Mayfield, Ky., facility was destroyed Dec. 10, 2021, by a tornado, and tragically, employees were killed and injured. We’re heartbroken about this, and our immediate efforts are to assist those affected by this terrible disaster. “Our company is family-owned and our employees, some who have worked with us for many years, are cherished. We’re immediately establishing an emergency fund to assist our employees and their families…
Read more at: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article256531471.html#storylink=cpy
The threat of terrorism means that we have grown accustomed to accepting, without protest, even the most humiliating security measures in airports. With hands in the air we allow our bodies to be scanned. We allow ourselves to be searched for concealed weapons. Every one of us is a potential terrorist. The virus is terror in the air. It represents a far graver threat than Islamic terrorism. It is almost a matter of the inexorable logic of the pandemic that society will be transformed into a permanent security zone, into a quarantine station in which everyone is treated as though they are infected.
— Excerpt, Capitalism and the death drive, The End of Liberalism: The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Consequences by Byung-chul Han p. 85
And yet, we ought never forget, there’s always beauty.
