Letters to the Editor
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@ ondelette
No, I'm not being sarcastic, and I quite share your confusion and horror, but yes, I do think that the to make an omelette, you must first break eggs, is a universal tenet of the managerial class in any society which is charged with -- or has charged itself with -- accomplishing grand things with only imperfect human vessels at its disposal. This doesn't need to occur on the scale of the Holocaust, or the liquidation of the Kulaks, for that matter. If someone told you how many people, on average, that building a certain dam or skyscraper would kill, would you proceed?
Being a middle-class white American, I've inherited the fruits of these institutional blindnesses without the attendant agonies, and consequently am free as few others in history have been to speculate on the consequences without having to endure them. I concede that point.
On the other hand, I've been both grunt and manager during my career, and I can say without any attempt at hiding my own moral qualms that to suppose even at my mundane level -- trying to get work done with a collection of the slow-witted and loony, the politically obstreperous, the morbidly time-serving, etc. -- that there is no moral minefield, is to lack such experience altogether.