Sometimes stories or headlines are so shocking you have to think “that can’t be true.” There were two such national news stories in the Eagle recently that hit us that way.

The first was the story about the efforts to make lynching officially a hate crime, and the second was that the EPA would like to ban asbestos.

Really, is there someone in this world who doesn’t recognize and accept the concept that lynching another human being is a hate crime? Congress has finally acted to define lynching as a hate crime after 200 failed attempts over the past 100 years to do it. Lynching goes far beyond a brutal crime against the person being murdered; it is an attempt to intimidate and psychologically damage a class or a group of people usually of one ethnic or racial group.

Hell yes it is a hate crime; in fact we can’t imagine how anything or any crime could be any more directly associated with hate crimes than a lynching. It seems that it shouldn’t have even needed a law to define it. It is itself the clearest definition of hate that we can imagine.

The second article ripped from the pages is that the EPA wants to ban asbestos. Are you telling me that asbestos isn’t already banned? Entire law firms exist solely for the purpose of suing companies that have exposed customers or employees to asbestos. Watch late-night TV where the ads are cheapest and you will see plenty of the traditional ambulance chaser ads. But right at the top of the list will be the guys who want you to know you may get an asbestos payday without even getting tested. That doesn’t seem right either, but that is television advertising.

We feel very fortunate to not have ever tested positive for asbestos poisoning. We were fortunate enough to secure a summer job in the mid 1970s at a manufacturing plant in Zelienople named Johns-Manville. Guess what they made? Insulating brick for furnaces. We spent nearly four months drilling holes to meet specifications in those insulation bricks. We didn’t know much about the product but it was a good job. But it did leave you covered head-to-toe in a white powder, and if you took a deep breath it would leave you wheezing like the old guys who had worked in the coal mines with the legendary “Big John.”

That white powder? Sure, asbestos residue. You know those masks we have been complaining about wearing the past two years? There were none of them offered to the line workers. Why we didn’t all die that summer, we don’t know. Maybe pure dumb luck. But we are here to tell the story and to wonder how in the world is the EPA just now getting around to completing the ban on asbestos? There are regulations in place limiting the types of asbestos that can still be used and how, but though manufacturing uses of it were known to be killing people just as surely as lynching, we have finally reached the point where some genius has decided to stop both forms of murder.

We are just shocked that it has taken so long to do the obvious. But let’s hold hearings over whether daylight saving time is important.

— RV