Chilean Miners Quotes

As TJ ambles off, Hunter stares after him, shaking his head ruefully. “Poor guy.” “What does that mean?” “It means, poor guy. He’s got a major crush on you, but he’s so deep in the friend zone it’d take the same rescue team that dug out the Chilean miners to save him. And even then I think they’d fail.

It seems silly to Franklin for his fellow miners to think of themselves as national heroes when all they’ve done is gotten themselves trapped in a place where only the desperate and the hard up for cash go to suffer and toil. They are famous now, yes, but that heady sense of fullness that fame gives you, that sense of being at the center of everything, will disappear quicker than they could possibly imagine. Franklin tries to speak this truth to his fellow miners, but he does so halfheartedly, because he knows the only way to learn it is to live it.

More than even loving your family, there is no more important ambition than finding a job that you love. If you don’t, you’ll reek of self-loathing like a porn star who can’t get the box cover, and your family will hate you for it. Loving your work doesn’t mean finding a job you can tolerate for eight hours a day, but rather a job that gets you flying out of bed in the morning like a Jack Russell who just had a firecracker stuffed up his ass. Was I ever addicted to my job? Damn right I was. You’re fucked if you aren’t. You better scratch and claw like a Chilean miner to find a gig worthy of gettin’ hooked on. Unlike your hobbies or your spouse, you gotta do your job every day regardless of whether or not it gets you revved up.

role in this incredible event. In August 2010, news reports around the world began to tell the story of the plight of 33 miners trapped 2,300 feet below the earth in a Chilean mine. As the daily reports continued, the entire world watched what seemed to be a completely hopeless situation. Every effort to make contact with the men failed. The miners were running out of supplies and going to die. Incredibly — and to the surprise of the entire world — contact was made with the miners after 17 days! Engineers had been able to drill a small shaft down to precisely where the miners were imprisoned. Through this small shaft, food, water, and other supplies could be sent down to the trapped men. The ordeal was far from over, though. In order to save them, a much larger shaft had to be drilled, one that would allow them to be brought to the surface one by one. It would take a miracle for this to happen. From St. Peter’s in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI asked the entire world to pray for the miners. As a special sign of hope, the Pope personally blessed 33 rosaries and sent them to the miners so that they could pray the rosary and know that Jesus and Mary were with them. The blessed rosaries were sent down the small shaft to the men, and they began to pray them and wear them around their necks. Miraculously, after having been trapped for 69 days, all 33 men survived and were rescued from the mine. One by one, they emerged from the depths of the earth and saw sunshine again. What was the date of their rescue? It was October 13, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima!

That must have been what I looked like to my doctor friend. That must be what I look like to anyone with a real problem—active-duty soldier, homeless person, Chilean miner, etc. A little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind. Either way, everything will be fine.

People are not disturbed by what happens to them, but by the view they take of what happens to them.

I swallow hard. My heart is pounding. Not even the sound of silence can be heard.

All shall be well…. He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.

One day the “Good Morning Everyone” team announces that the government of the Dominican Republic has offered to bring all thirty-three miners and their families to a relaxing resort in that Caribbean island nation.

That’s the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate,” he says. “That’s what’s beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen.” Now

We made a small place where people could go and let go of their pain, where they could pray for the miners, and start to forget that they might be dead,” Carmen says.

addition to the stresses and sorrows of a miner’s life, there is the fortitude, brotherhood, and sense of self-worth mining’s hypermasculine culture

artisan miners whose culture shaped the childhood and family life of several of the thirty-three men.

That was horrible. That was like a second death,” one of the miners says. The idea that they’ve been doomed, again, by the mine’s owners becomes a real possibility: The San Esteban Mining Company’s blueprints are so unreliable that the driller-rescuers up on the surface will never find them. “The mine’s blueprints are shit,” they shout. La planificación de la mina es una hueva. The thirty-three men now sit in the dark, wondering if they’ll die suffering this final assault on their dignity: trapped here, starving, with other mining men working to reach them, their efforts betrayed by a company too cheap to even know, with certainty, where its own tunnels are.

The miner who suffers nature's wrath in explosions, landslides, falls, and silicosis, or black lung disease, has been a representative figure of Chilean nationhood, just as mining itself has fueled the economy since the nineteenth century. But the (always male) miner conquering (female) nature, overcoming danger and disaster to extract ore, the bounty granted to Chile by nature, has also been a source of national pride.

They are the same sort who developed a protocol for lynching disruptive blacks and Mexicans and Chileans and Native Americans. They are the same sort who will, in another few decades, form a mob in Oregon to murder more than thirty Chinese miners; the same sort who will, soon after that, chase throngs of Sikhs from Washington.