A tale of two shipwrecks

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Over the past ten days, two maritime disasters occurred that once again cast a bright light upon the stark differences between public perception and public outcry based upon demographic markings like race, religion, and socio-economic class. 

Last week, a fishing vessel set sail from Pakistan with over 700 immigrants seeking to find work, food, and shelter in Europe amid an economic crisis in Pakistan that's nowhere close to abating anytime soon. The vessel capsized off of the coast of Greece and soon thereafter, over 300 people lost their lives at sea in what's been called the worst accident in modern Mediterranean Sea history. 

Pakistani immigrant boat

On Sunday, the Titan submersible, owned by Oceangate, set out to plunge two miles deep into the Atlantic Ocean to allow its passengers to get a close-up glimpse of the wreckage of the Titanic, the White Star Line luxury cruiser that struck an iceberg in April of 1912, sank, and took 1,503 souls to a watery grave. 

The Titan submersible

The passengers on the Titan paid $250,000 dollars per person for a trip that, tragically, turned deadly within its first hour this past Sunday according to Coast Guard officials. While the major news media and world writ large via social media anxiously waited this week with hopes that the Titan and its passengers would be found alive, yesterday, the robotic vessel sent to locate it discovered a debris field which revealed that the Titan had imploded and strewn its physical remains along the sea floor near the Titanic's ancient, rusting bow. 

The five Titan passengers who perished included Suleman Dawood, 19; his billionaire father Shahzada, 48; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, 61. According to a number of scientists who made the media rounds yesterday, the victims quite likely felt no pain and liquefied immediately upon explosion—leaving no discernable remains to be recovered and buried. 

Again, while both accidents are tragedies, the responses to the same stood in stark contrast in that the Pakistani immigrant boat drew scant mention in the mainstream and social media, while the Titan submersible received nearly round-the-clock coverage!

I sense that the latter received more attention for two reasons; first, the idea that billionaires collectively paid a million dollars to get into a vessel that was criticized for not being fit for the task of exploring the Atlantic's depths struck many people, including yours truly, as a painfully risky crusade. When officials suggested that the Titan had four days worth of oxygen and that noises were heard that could have come from passengers on the ship, I, for one, thought that it was quite likely that the ship would be found, raised, and that the passengers would make the interview rounds where they would be roasted for such a deadly and quixotic quest.

The second reason that I sense that so much attention was paid to the Titan submersible is that the world, still, is fascinated by the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In America, there's a reason that so many people loved and voted for billionaire Donald Trump despite his woeful lack of qualifications to be president...there's a reason that sites like TMZ garner far more interested people and clicks than news and information sites... there's a reason that so many people are willing to curse you out and fight about this superstar or that superstar, as if they are defending their personal friends or family members online. I, too, have been guilty of some of this in the past, thus, my ability to call it out in today's blog.

But I noticed that when the calls for empathy rang out this past week, as they did by many folks on social media who were appalled by the memes that were generated after the Titan submersible went missing, it was not lost upon me that many of the same moralists had few to no calls for empathy on their own social media pages for the 300 poor Pakistanis who died at sea this past week! Few to none of the moralists used their own social media platforms to blast the economic conditions in Pakistan that are reportedly so dire that the nation is desperately seeking to secure assistance from the International Monetary Fund. In fact, there is a cruel sense of irony that during the same week that hundreds of poor Pakistani immigrants died in their quest for better living conditions, that British-Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son and heir, Suleman, died during the father's thrill seeking quest to visit the Titanic.

I came to realize many years ago that social media means different things to different people, a realization that occurred because I used to wonder why certain topics that I posted about, like abortion, civil rights, and foreign policy, generated fewer discussions than posts about athletes, entertainers, or the rich and powerful. And I learned, rather quickly, that people will speak out on the topics that they feel the most interested in or, the key point, topics that they feel comfortable discussing in the public square. 

But I also learned many years before then that to a great extent, people of all races and demographic backgrounds seem to struggle with news about the abjectly poor because by viewing the same, they realize that at one point in time, that their immediate ancestors were abjectly poor or, far more ominously, see themselves in the present moment as only being saved by Grace from the fate of poor immigrants who die in search of better living conditions. 

Which leads me to conclude that I see the two tragedies at sea this week as painful signs of the times in that one was due to the extreme poverty that leads many to take desperate measures to survive, while the other was due to extreme wealth that develops a hubris that dare suggests that a submersible with questionable strength  was sufficient to travel to the bottom of the ocean blue. 

Lest we forget...