It all started when Harry spent three weeks with food poisoning. He had eaten from a can of meat which had been part of a tainted shipment which the government had not stopped from being distributed because it had cut back on the number of inspectors it employed at meat packing plants.
Harry shrugged it off. Harry understood about deregulation. Three weeks of vomiting, diarrhea and bedsores seemed a small price to pay for getting government off the back of the meat packing industry.
A couple of weeks after Harry got back on his feet, he lost the tips of three fingers in a buzzsaw accident at the sawmill. It took him 17 days to recover; when he finally returned to work, he was reassigned to a desk job at a substantial cut in pay.
Harry calmly accepted this. Harry understood about deregulation. Being maimed and having your career brought to a screeching halt seemed a small price to pay for a weakened Occupational Health and Safety Act that would allow American businesses to compete.
It was around this time, too, that Harry lost his life savings when his local thrift filed for bankruptcy. The company probably would have survived the billions of dollars in questionable loans, but when the directors flew off to Rio with suitcases full of depositors’ money – well, few institutions could survive such punishment.
Harry laughed in the face of financial ruin, however weakly. You see, Harry understood about deregulation. If tens of thousands of ordinary people had to lose their life’s savings so that American financial institutions could be freed to innovate in the increasingly competitive international market, well, that seemed like a small price to pay.
This was only a couple of months before Harry’s children started getting sick – their skin bruised easily, they couldn’t hold down their food, they had no energy. People in the neighbourhood, who were having similar problems with their children, traced them to a nearby nuclear power plant which, either accidentally or by design, was dumping radioactive waste into the local water system.
Harry did not join the class action suit against the power company. Harry understood about deregulation. An unsafe environment seemed a small price to pay for a secure source of inexpensive energy for generations to come. It was a shame that children seemed particularly susceptible to environmental poisons, but nobody said progress would come without a price.
In any case, Harry didn’t have much time to worry about it. Soon after the class action suit began, his wife and three children were killed on a trip to see Aunt Gertrude in Oswego; owing to a minor technical malfunction, their plane had slid off the runway on takeoff and exploded.
Harry was sad, but he wasn’t bitter. Harry understood about deregulation. A handful of lives seemed insignificant when weighed against a more competitive transportation system.
Three weeks later, Harry was paralyzed from the neck down when a tanker carrying a heavier load than it was designed for jumped a guardrail and plowed into his station wagon. Harry grimaced through the pain. Harry understood about deregulation. If the economy required less inspection of the trucking industry, so be it.
Harry died of complications in the nursing home in which he had been stuck. Without savings, health insurance or a high income, he could only afford a dark, dirty place where he was improperly fed and infrequently cared for. But, Harry wouldn’t want us to say he died of neglect. Harry understood about deregulation. Untold hours of suffering and misery were acceptable if the nursing home industry would be stronger because of it.
A few years after he was buried, several graves were flooded and washed into a ravine. The company which ran the funeral home quietly gathered up the remains and put them in new caskets, free of charge, hoping the surviving relatives wouldn’t kick up a fuss. Thus, Harry’s bones were mixed in with those of a dozen people he had never known.
Would Harry have complained about this final indignity? Would he have said enough was enough, that lack of regulation of industry had hidden costs, in human health and safety as well as expenditures which would ultimately have to be borne by the public? Would he have argued that business had a moral obligation to its employees and customers to make safe products in as unharmful a way as possible? That this was not an unnecessary frill, but a necessary cost of doing business?
No.
Harry understood about deregulation.