The Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, SD has acknowledged 518 employees have tested positive for the coronavirus. Making it the single hottest cluster in the continental United States. Plus an additional 126 more collateral individuals there, who are not employees, also tested positive. Bringing the total number to 644 positives. www.ibtimes.com/...
Here’s the part of the story that you won’t hear on the 6 o’clock news. Meat packing plants typically now employ undocumented immigrants from places like Somalia, Mexico and Central America. At a pay rate that is around one half to one third of what such jobs paid before unions mysteriously disappeared from most of America. Essentially, now just a shade above minimum wage.
But here’s the most important part of the story. Mathematically there is virtually no way that the owners of that business were not well aware that something very serious was going on by the time there were at most 50 positives. And at that point, avoiding reaching 100 should have been of absolute paramount importance. But instead we’re talking about what should be an unfathomable number of 644 total cases here!
Anything over about 50 cases is effectively criminal endangerment. But 644? That should be well into the territory of attempted mass murder!
However, there are two narratives at work here that sooner or later we’re going to have to get real serious about. The very obvious greed. But the much harder to talk about, total lack of compassion for folks considered to be either non-American, or else full-on nonhuman. Therefore, the real outrage is not that “they” did this. It needs to be that we are all allowing certain people in America to still regularly be treated as nonhuman.
Sooner or later, the costs of that continuing inhumanity on our watch are going to reach all of us!