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Poster of "The Railway Men" Credit: Wikipedia |
I'm spending more time on BlueSky these days, and less time on Twitter. I was struck by
this question by a reporter the other day (undoubtedly brought on by the Netflix series
"The Railway Men"):
"Do people in the US still learn about the Bhopal disaster (in a not specialized course) or has it been memory holed?"
First, I want to quibble with the premise. As someone who basically remembers quite a bit about middle school and high school, I genuinely don't understand the concept of 'the memory hole' - we don't live in a world where facts are destroyed, so what do you mean? Do people mean "people forget about stuff" or do people mean "this fact that I think is important isn't talked about enough, in my opinion" or do people mean "this bit of news has been deliberately suppressed"?
The other question is "what do you mean, 'learn (in a not specialized course)'"? We don't really have a place for learning about industrial disasters, other than history courses, and we don't really tend to cover industrial disasters in regular history courses, which tend to be about the formation of nation-states and the history of their governments. Chernobyl, for example, is a pretty grim instance of a Soviet-era industrial disaster, and the only place I could imagine seeing it in a US history course is in the "late Cold War" section as a part of the demise of the Soviet Union. While I consumed article after article in National Geographic about Chernobyl, I imagine that the average high schooler these days gets about 10 minutes.
Setting that aside, I noted that I felt like the Bhopal disaster gets talked about in organic chemistry. I feel like, but I don't exactly remember, that I learned about methyl isocyanate either in undergrad, but definitely in graduate school. I have become quite the enthusiast about the work product of the Chemical Safety Board, so I certainly remember watching the Bayer CropScience video, which also talked about Bhopal. I'm probably both the exact right person to make the query ('is our children learning about Bhopal?') and exactly the wrong person to answer the question.
So, reader - some questions for you:
- How old are you? (You can be vague)
- Did you learn about the Bhopal incident?
- When did you learn about it? Random reading, or in a class?
- Did you learn about methyl isocyanate in organic chemistry?
- If you're a professor of chemistry, have you taught about Bhopal? If so, what do you say?
Thanks for your help.