Sitting in Ivory Towers: Ph.Ds Should Not Pass Judgmental Expert Comments on Chilean Miners, Their Families and Their Minds

If I work sitting in a plush office chair, clad in the best suit and a miner does manual work in dirty overalls, that doesn't mean that a miner has a fragile mind and that my mind can cope dangers better.

And some psychologists in lab coats who had never worn miners' overalls should not be assessing and judging the "minds" of the trapped miners.

Funny how these self-styled readers of human minds have decided that the relationships of the miners with their respective families have changed for ever.

If these so-called experts think that the Chilean miners are married to spouses who will ditch them at the drop of a hat, they are mistaken.

Those women as well as their families are used to the long absence of their spouses from homes, though not this long. They have lived every day of their lives facing the possibility of a miner never coming back alive.

That is not something the expert commentators or plebeians like I are used to.

Their "faith" is absolute.

What amazed me was the infinite faith those miners and their rescuers exhibited in the face of such a calamity.

Each day the rescuers came to the site carrying a big statue of St. Mary on their shoulders. Shameful that only one US print media had the courage to show that as most media in this country are anti-Catholic. Main stream media moghuls may have funny ideas about the biases and prejudices of their audience.

I am a non-Catholic and do not pray to St. Mary. But that doesn't mean that I shun the importance of that "show of faith" just because they carried a statue of St. Mary.

That faith in God is far superior to the knowledge of any psychologist on earth.

Those who have never faced such harsh daily realities should not be judging people on the basis of their Ph.D. theses or researches funded by pharmaceutical companies in a hurry to dump drugs on unsuspecting populace.

High time "learned" men and women stopped "dreaming" of Chilean miners turning imbeciles and invalids on coming out or of the Chilean women divorcing their miner husbands at the slightest pretext.

That many highly educated people cannot cope with vagaries of life and may freak out doesn't make anybody qualified to pass unwarranted assumptions on miners who went out every day of their lives into those mines with the prospect of death looming in front of them.

They have lived their lives with faith and conviction while going in and will live with the same faith and conviction on coming out.

And their enduring faith and conviction are not going to disappear just because I carry some degrees after my name.