We humans are story telling creatures. We look for patterns. We pass on knowledge and history and culture through stories and folklore of all sorts. Across centuries and cultures and many mediums this has always been the case. Stories have power. The power to inspire, to enthrall, to obsess and to distract. The stories we listen to, the stories we tell ourselves and one another can touch our minds and hearts. They can lay bare what is yet unacknowledged or unknown within our thoughts and souls. They can teach us lessons about ourselves, the world around us, our culture. They can affect change within us and within the world around us.
Until recently the story that seems to have obsessed… well… if my social media feeds are to be believed, damn near EVERYONE has been the story of the Titan submersible. Looking at this tragedy from the outside, as a story, it has a lot going for it.
Five fantastically wealthy were lost within the ocean. Trapped. Their fates were yet unknown and the time limit for their breathable air in tiny, tomb-like, inescapable, craft running out. Trapped in darkness and running out of air, the stuff of horror. Ships were dispatched from the fleets of nations to look for them. As the time passed the very serious concerns about the safety and actual viability of their craft came out. The hubris of the Titan’s creator and his disregard for regulations and the relative cheapness of the materials used to create the submersible came to light. The perception of a potential race against time. The very stuff of a dramatic and moving story. One that could (as far as we knew at the time) have ended in triumph or tragedy.
Many people across social media expressed their lack of sympathy for these fantastically wealthy men, who paid four-and-a-half times many peoples life savings for a privilege that (we now know) led to their perishing. Here the stories told about this event started to tell us about, not only the storytellers, but the world they are living in. One of the incredible disparities of wealth and power and justice in the world today. There was a lack of sympathy for these five men, and their status and station and wealth. Some of the posts and videos calling it justice even as they called out the terrible ironies of Titan taking the lives of these seven wealthy men, most of whom were on a pleasure jaunt to visit Titanic; the graveyard of hundreds of people the majority of whom were poor and simply traveling in hopes of a better life for themselves and their children.
Then the narratives began to suffer a sea change as commenters and other creators began to decry the lack of sympathy being shown towards these men. Onlookers and critics decried the purported cruelty or insensitivity of the many memes and posts.
For myself, I had some sympathy towards this view. At the same time, I could acknowledge the profoundly dark ironies, and like many who have been through dark and difficult times, I appreciated the dark humor deployed in observations across many forms of media. There was, certainly, some insensitivity or anger expressed but at the same time I can understand where that is coming from in a world where so many of us are struggling to get by and living from paycheck to paycheck if we are lucky. I could understand the characterizations of these 5 as feckless or reckless. I could understand the darkness and vitriol as ways of fending off the slow burning horror the thought of the situation may have brought to the hearts and minds of some.
Arguments erupted and narratives were spun on the alleged insensitivity or cruelty of the many stories mocking or even reveling in the situation. Some solely blamed the creators in question. Others the nature of social media and the disconnection of society. Many arguments and stories, often with one philosophical axe or another to grind.
Finally, past the point where their air would have run out, the wreckage was found. Not at all far from their last known location. New facts emerged. Titan had imploded. Naval listening posts had noted the noise of a possible implosion when it happened, shortly after they disappeared, and this knowledge had been passed along and apparently disregarded or ignored. Experts in the field of underwater searches and rescues had advised starting from the last known location and spiraling outward; advice ignored in favor of a longer and more laborious grid search larger than some nations.
The arguments born of this event continue even as our 24-hour news cycle submerged them into a somewhat nebulous sense of ‘the past’ with news of a potential coup in Russia.
I would love to wrap this up here, with some sort of deep and philosophical point about all the above. Something satisfying that speaks to all of our shared humanity and worth and dignity and wraps things up in a tidy bow. I cannot.
All the above is not what is troubling me. That is not what led me back here to write out from my heart and mind, to exorcise demons of doubt and worry and grief from the echo chambers of my mind and soul. The questions that are haunting me when I look at the last week or so include, “Why THIS story?” “Why THIS discourse?”
The Titan submersible went missing, imploded as we now know, on June 18th.
Four days before in the early morning hours of June 14th a fishing boat overloaded with approximately 750 people capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Greece. 104 survivors were rescued, 78 bodies were recovered, the rest are still missing; including between 50 to 100 children. They were migrants and refugees from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine; nations battered by war, poverty, hunger, and political oppression. It is known that some of them were in contact with a refugee hotline before this tragedy, one of the largest in the history of the Mediterranean. It is known that there were other boats in the area, some of which were able to get water and supplies to this ship. The Greek coast guard were reportedly in communication with the vessel. Though there are now serious questions being asked about the Greek governments account of their involvement and decisions.
The Mediterranean is not so huge a body of water that ships could not have been summoned to aid a foundering vessel in the hours leading up to its capsizing. Couldn’t the resources of nations and corporations have been dispatched with a quickness to at least ATTEMPT to prevent what seems to have obviously been a tragedy in the making?
“Why not THAT story?”
“Why not THAT discourse?”
Nagging at me at irregular intervals. After all, there is as much tragedy and tragic irony and moving and powerful narrative potential in the loss of over 500 people, many of whom had spent their life savings to make their dangerous and doomed journey. They have, at least, as much human worth and dignity as the 5 men from the Titan. We know those men’s names and histories. We cannot know all the names of those lost on the fishing boat… hell, I haven’t even been able to find out the NAME of the fishing boat!
“Why didn’t the waters of social media churn like the ocean’s waves with THAT story?”
“Why did I only learn about THAT story as a side effect of discussions about the Titan?”
What haunts me and has me thinking about stories and their power to change us and change the world, what has me turning over so many narratives I have been told over the years at this point, is an idea suggested by someone commenting on the juxtaposition of these two stories. They were righteously and justifiably outraged at the relative silence across so much of social media about the capsized ship being eclipsed by the Titan submersible.
They pointed out that we are all too often told we are not *supposed* to care about the poor.
Chrysalis 