Am I the only one in West Virginia who is seeing the similarity between coal miners and our soldiers?

Both groups often represent the best of our rural communities: people who put themselves in harm’s way so they can earn a decent living, take care of their families – and take care of the rest of us.

West Virginia’s mountain country breeds people who are fiercely attached to the landscape and its communities. That landscape, alas, doesn’t allow for much in the way of economic activity. It’s not great farming country. It’s inaccessible. It doesn’t provide a lot of opportunities to earn a decent living.

So generation after generation, young people looking to make a way in the world go in two directions: the coal mines and the military.

Both occupations are exacting and dangerous, requiring skill, courage and maybe even a bit of recklessness.

And in both, decisions are made by people who are not themselves in the line of fire. In many cases, the interests of the people running the show and the people doing the work are at odds.

Coal company executives are answerable to shareholders who want maximum profits with least possible expenditure on anything that doesn’t directly contribute to the extraction of coal. So, generation after generation, miners die of preventable mining-induced diseases like black lung and preventable accidents.

High-ranking military officers are answerable to administrations that want quick results without spending too much attention or money on niceties like body armor or safe vehicles or training troops in the complexities of foreign cultures so they can avoid making simple blunders that antagonize the people they’re supposed to be trying to help.

Soldiers lose their lives because their armor protects only their chests and backs or their vehicles lack sufficient armor plating. They die because the brass wants to get somewhere in a hurry and can’t wait for an escort. They die because the locals are needlessly affronted and inspired to help an insurgency they didn’t much like to begin with. They die because money that was supposed to pay for their supplies is lost to graft.

In West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia, we’re learning, miners die because they lack simple safety equipment that’s standard in other places.

While the men of Sago were dying, three men were trapped in a small nickel mine in Tasmania.

They simply retreated to a purpose-built rescue chamber stocked with oxygen, food and water and waited. After they were rescued, the miners said they weren’t overly worried. They had been trained in the use of the shelter. Their worst problem was boredom.

It has also emerged that miners at Sago had an obsolete communication system; most West Virginia high school students have more up-to-date technology for staying in touch with each other.

In both cases, making war and mining coal, important people in a hurry for results economize on their human capital. In both cases, it means empty places at the table and holes in small communities where each absence hurts badly and healing is slow.

In each case, they say the disasters will lead to improvement, that investigations will reveal the need for more protection, more attention to safety, stricter enforcement of regulations. They always say that. Sometimes it happens and sometimes not.

And still, generation after generation, West Virginians go down in the mines and march off to war.

Maybe one reason why things change so slowly – if at all – is that those people need the rest of us to keep their bosses honest, and the rest of us have short attention spans. When they die needlessly, our sorrow is real – but after a few weeks or a few months, with other demands on our concern, we turn back to our daily lives.

We forget to hold accountable the politicians who deplete the regulatory agencies that are supposed to enforce the rules. As the tragedies fade into the past, our compassion falters. It gets easier to mark the ones who keep making noise as bleeding-heart loonies.

So here’s our test: Six months from now, will our troops have the armor they need? Will the men of Sago still be on our minds? Will the Mine Safety and Health Administration be doing its job? Will the International Coal Group be paying fines that actually hurt? Will the mine be properly vented? Will we invite the Tasmanians to tell us how their rescue chambers work?

Let’s check in with each other sometime next July.