Who was Karen Silkwood?
She was a 28-year-old mother of three children; a lab worker at the K-M plant in Oklahoma; an intelligent woman who understood that she and her fellow workers were being poisoned by a carcinogen. She persisted in wanting to put things right at her workplace. In the last few months of her life, we can safely say, she was redeemed for any “ordinariness” or for anything she may have regretted in her life by her actions as “neighbour” in the tradition of the Good Samaritan and by her defiance of the objectification of flesh-and-blood human beings in their workplaces for a supposedly greater utilitarian good or economic virtue. She cried “No!” to evil without a hint of self-righteousness. It was a primordial “no” to the bevy of managers requiring obedient and docile conduct from workers who were being poisoned. During the last few months of her life, Karen lived in fear and anxiety. But she could not accept or bow to an authority that was killing her and her co-workers. She could not play i
Karen Silkwood was a worker the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Plant in Cimarron, Oklahoma. She blew the whistle on the plant after discovering she had been irradiated due to insufficient safety precautions. During the incident several problems at the factory came to light, not the least of which was an enormous amount of missing plutonium. She officially died in a “one person” car wreck, though there were several irregularities in her autopsy, including the presence of drugs in her system and dents consistent with being rear-ended by a second car, so her death was considered suspicious (especially in light of the circumstances). They made a movie of the incident entitled “Silkwood”, in 1983, starring Meryl Streep. To learn a bit more about Karen Silkwood, you can simply google her on the web… there’s no end of information about the incident online.
