Blog Post for the Week of January 27


I found our discussion of the history of the Panama Canal to be very interesting. A few years back I had the opportunity to visit the canal, which I found fascinating. Above is a picture I took from the plane landing in Panama City showing all the ships waiting to pass through. The detail I find most mind-boggling about the canal is the staggering amount of human lives that were lost. One estimate places the number of deaths at 25,000 total between the different nations that attempted the feat. I find this number astronomical, and it reminds me of the great lengths people are willing to go through to somehow improve trade or wealth. When finished, the canal did shave a lot of time off of a ship's transit between the east and west coast of the US, but was it worth 25,000 or more lives? Many of these lives lost were from the failed French attempt to make the canal. This makes me wonder why the US, after seeing the bankruptcy and death toll from the French attempt, decided to go forward with new canal plans anyway. It seems at the time our country had some sort of Machiavellian "the ends justify the means" mentality where the benefit of the canal justified the lives lost building it. This same mentality is evident elsewhere in US history, such as the removal of Natives from their land to gain access to resources. It seems in the past the US was willing to go to great lengths and means to achieve the end goal of wealth and expansion. In my opinion, though, saving time or making money is not worth people losing their lives or livelihoods. Hopefully in the future our nation will more carefully consider the human costs of attaining its goals.

The numbers in the post were from this page:

https://www.history.com/news/panama-canal-construction-dangers

Comments

  1. Médar SerrataFebruary 9, 2022 at 12:41 PM

    Thank you, Joe, for your post. You pose some important ethical questions. Indeed, it seems that capitalism, in general, values profits over the lives of workers. This can be seen in the history of the Canal but also in other chapters of US history, as you well point out.

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