Balance

This time last week the topic du jour was the loss of the Titan, a tourism deep sea submersible that disappeared on its way to tour the rusting remains of the Titanic only to be found a few days later scattered across the ocean floor, imploded by the enormous water pressure that far down.

A short while before that, a refugee boat trying to reach Greece with Middle Eastern refugees capsized and sank, killing almost 700 people.

Almost all the world’s media attention seemed focused on the then missing submersible and the five people onboard:  Stockton Rush, CEO of the company that operated the submersible; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood; British billionaire Hamish Harding; celebrated Titanic researcher and former commander in the French navy, Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Tickets for the trip down to the Titanic cost a cool quarter million apiece. 

In return, the customers got to sit cross legged on a thin padded cushion inside a tube roughly the size of a sewer pipe.  They really couldn’t see anything as the designers mounted the only porthole in a hard to reach location; what the tourists could see would be piped in to them by a video feed, so they might as well have stayed home and popped a Titanic documentary Blu-ray into their player.

For what they actually experienced, they would have been better off driving their cars through a carwash a couple of dozen times while watching a James Cameron video on their laptops.

So what did they get for their cool quarter million?

Bragging rights.

The ability to say “I visited the Titanic”.

In short:  Conspicuous consumption.

The refugees aboard the disabled fishing boat that capsized paid an average of around $1,000 to cram aboard the tiny vessel and risk the high seas in hopes of reaching Europe where they might find safety for their families and employment to feed / house / clothe them.

Many of they were fleeing war-torn regions of the Middle East and were desperate to get their wives and children to safety.

They were allowed to drift without aid for a couple of days, with the Greek Coast Guard coming to their aid only after they suffered their own catastrophic vessel failure.

The story dominated the news cycle for several days as false sonar readings led international search and rescue teams to hope they might rescue the five people about the submersible before their oxygen ran out.

During that time the Internet being the Internet posted an enormous number of comments and opinions on the story.

Many pointed out the irony of paying a lot of money for what wasn’t really a premium experience, only to be put at risk by the slipshod safety standards of the owner.

This ranged from simple irony to downright glee at the thought of a boatload of billionaires being trapped on the bottom of the sea.

A lot of other people got upset at this, growing angry with the mockers.

Much of their reaction seems to be based on their ability to imagine themselves in such a situation, trapped in a large metal tube miles down, waiting for your oxygen to run out.

They probably showed more empathy to the billionaires that the billionaire class as a whole showed to them.

They could put themselves inside that situation and could easily feel the terror and hopelessness they imagine the billionaires to be suffering,

The only bright spot in the story is that the sub exploded in the blink of an eye, the poor* bastards never realizing what hit ‘em.

At that depth there are no slow leaks.  The pressure grows and grows until the sub implodes with enough force to resemble a bomb.

One moment they were alive and presumable having a grand adventure, the next their physical forms were thoroughly obliterated.

There will be no body recovery operations because there aren’t any bodies left to recover.

The poor** souls on the capsized fishing boat share a different story.

No bragging rights among them, no vast sums of capital to expend on frivolous pursuits.

It took everything they had for them and their families to climb aboard a near derelict old fishing boat and risk a cross water passage in the hopes they might be able to persuade a European nation to allow them to stay and work for them.

They were prepared to put in decades of hard, backbreaking in the hopes their children would enjoy better, safer lives.

The children and the mothers died the horrible drowning death that so many fascinated by he missing submersible thought the billionaires went through. 

It’s not a competition, and I take no delight in the needless death of anyone, but the billionaires never got the chance to suffer, while the children and mothers -- staying below deck while their husbands and older brothers stayed on deck in the hot, hot sun -- did spend several long, agonizing, terrifying moments trapped inside a rapidly flooding overturned vessel, tangled up in a mass of thrashing and writhing bodies and limbs, desperately trying to find their family, find an escape…

…knowing this was it, this was the way they were going to die.

Billionaires put those refugees on that boat.

Oh, not the billionaires on the imploded submersible, but those in their class.

Billionaires who make money playing off shortages to drive profits up and labor costs down, billionaires who trade the arms and sell the weapons that make the global endless wars possible, billionaires who stoke the flames of ethnic and religious bigotry to maintain power and influence.

And who knows, maybe some of the billionaires a board the imploded submersible invested in companies that have nice, safe, generic names but actually deal in death and misery.

The billionaires aboard the submersible never get their hands dirty doing that, but the money is clean by the time it reaches them.

So I get…kinda…why so many people online got upset at what they perceived as joy at the death of the billionaires.

They were able to visual their shared humanity with the billionaires, and the terror of what they incorrectly perceived as the fate befalling.

They couldn’t with the refugees, and to be fair, that might be entirely due to the sheer number of them.

“One death is a tragedy; a million, statistics,” as that world famous humanitarian Josef Stalin once observed.

But the refugees were just as human and are just as dead as the five aboard the submersible.  Their deaths weren’t mocked.

Quite the contrary:  They were ignored. 

The capper irony to this story is than many of the refugee survivors were saved by a superyacht belonging to a Mexican silver magnate that came to their aid when the Greek Coast Guard appeared reluctant to do so.  Conspicuous consumption applied to good effect this time.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Figuratively.

**  Literally.