The wonderful television of trapped miners in Chile emerging unscathed from their hole after 70 days, thanks to technology and government perseverance, is a once in a lifetime type things. Thirty three lives that faced certain death emerging to embrace life and their wives and the president of the country who stood by to personally greet them, along with an estimated worldwide audience of 1 billion.
Like many, I saw the first few miners emerge late Tuesday night, went to bed, woke up to check the scoreboard and checked back frequently through the day.
By the time the last miner was emerging, CNN cutaway from its otherwise newsworthy debate featuring Catherine O’Donnell, to witness the event. In the restaurant I was in, the music was turned down and the CNN audio turned up to match the bigtime drama on the big screen TV.
The last time I remember such a momentous shared news experience at a restaurant was when Tanya Harding went skating at the Olympics following the Nancy Carrigan incident.
This was better, though, much better – a feel good story that the networks couldn’t be more grateful for, after what seems like a year of relentless bad news.
In fact, the joy of the event was a complete contrast from the other months-long event involving Mother Earth serving up something up from deep inside of her.
Having miners emerge from their exile deep in the ground was the opposite of watching millions of barrels of oil gush out, day in and day out, from the broken BP rig.