Safe Can Be A Lie
“Triangle: The Musical” at TheaterWorks Silicon Valley. Photo by Kevin Berne.
Safe isn’t happy.
Safe can be a lie.
Safe is a rule you make
But never question why.
- From Triangle: The Musical
On this day 114 years ago, a spark ignited a bin of fabric scraps at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. The fire spread with ferocious speed, killing 146 workers, mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women. Many died leaping from the ninth floor windows, the only escape from the flames and the locked doors and the willful negligence of the factory’s owners.
When I wrote the lyrics to the song “Safe,” I was thinking about the way history repeats. How tragedies will come, and keep coming, no matter how protected we may feel. A fire will erupt in a factory. A plane will be flown into a skyscraper. A person we care about will be gone in an instant. But it is in how we live and love in the face of this terribly certain uncertainty that matters.
What I didn’t think about, what I didn’t think was possible, was that the historical circumstances that lead to the Triangle fire would repeat themselves as well. Who could imagine us returning to a turn of the nineteenth century America?
The Gilded Age was a world where income inequality was a chasm, with the richest 1% holding half the nation’s wealth. It was a time when a handful of businessmen, with names you still recognize like Carnegie and Rockefeller, exploited workers and bribed politicians to further line their perfectly tailored pockets. It was a time when these robber barons and politicians fomented animosity between the poorest, perhaps encouraging the Italians to hate the Jews for supposedly taking their jobs, so that these groups didn’t turn their ire on those that truly were keeping them stuck in poverty. It was a time when Reconstruction’s financial and political gains for formerly enslaved Black Americans were violently reversed using old racist ideas in new clothes. It was a time when unions were suppressed and federal regulations over the safety of food, labor conditions, and transportation were rare and rarely enforced. And it was a time when those in power felt “might makes right,” that if you have the ability you should use any means necessary to take what you can, whether that be money or sovereign territory.
But on this day 114 years ago, on the streets below the Triangle Factory where bodies were laid out in row after row, another spark ignited. Brave women and men took to the streets, risking their lives and their livelihoods, to march for better working conditions and social justice. They fought and won changes in law and society that benefited people for generations to follow. They fought for themselves and for their neighbors, even those that did not look or live like they did. By coming together, they changed the world.
Many of us think we are safe. Our paycheck, our skin color, our citizenship status wraps us in a warm blanket that we pull tighter around us, thinking this is not happening. Or this is happening to someone else. But safe can be a lie. And the fire will come. It always does.