A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.
It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.
Absolutely.
I just find this sort of article kind of pointless. Response to a situation in one place was drastically different than a response in a completely different place involving completely different people and agencies with their own different priorities. I don’t think it’s all that illuminating in any global way, except it shows the priorities in one of those places aren’t great. A commentary on the same agency (or even country) responding differently to rich and poor would be more meaningful, but I think the US Coast Guard was pretty proactive when Cuban refugees were crossing in makeshift rafts (a commentary on the difference between US and Greece in those much more similar situations would be interesting, but wouldn’t hit the rich/poor or anti-immigrant angle).
That’s fair as far as it goes, but there are analogous behaviors on the US side of things as well. This is just another instance in which the US government has gone to incredible lengths to rescue tourists who got in over their heads (Wendover Productions touched on this in recent video about the National Park System, if you’re interested) at the same time that Border Patrol and local vigilantes have been recorded sabotaging water caches left as life-saving measures for migrants crossing arid parts of the southern border. That’s a pretty clear indication of which sorts of lives our society thinks matter, and just as in the Mediterranean it more or less comes down to “which ones look and talk like I do?” rather than “which ones are most deserving of the limited resources available to help them?”
but that unto itself is kind of important, is it not? these are social tragedies which do not need to happen–but they’re basically allowed to happen by a mixture of social apathy, lack of scrutiny, and inhuman social and political incentives. you’re demonstrating why this is illuminating, and why we should talk about it: because the alternatives you describe can happen and are happening but don’t with certain groups, or from certain countries.
We are a global people. We could do more, and we actively don’t. We should all be ashamed and just because it makes you feel uncomfortable or helpless doesn’t mean you have to rationalize the shame of our species.
We need to face it if we’ll ever change it.