The "New Age" Triangle Fire

The parallels between the fire at Tazreen Fashions Limited in Bangladesh and the famous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York are so strong as to be heartbreakingly pathetic. On the other hand ours is a culture with so little concern for history that those parallels are likely to go unrecognized. According to today's BBC News report, Walmart has deftly distanced themselves from the disaster by pawning all responsibility off to a supplier and then cutting all connections (for now, at least) to that supplier. However, it would seem that the real lesson here is that we can no longer get away with just dismissing history as bunk. Rather, we need to recognize that, for the rich and mighty, history is a bothersome inconvenience that threatens to narrow profit margins.