When history looks back – assuming that history can look and that we’ve not trashed the world to the point of extinction – it will surely look with amazement at our world and wonder at the things that happened side-by-side.
We have a prime example at the moment: as I type this, the lives of five people are in dire peril. They are on board a submersible that went down to have a close look at the wreck of the Titanic on the sea bed – Hamish Harding, a 58-year-old British businessman and explorer, British businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman Dawood, 19, 77-year-old French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, the firm behind the dive. The word is that a place on the submersible cost $250,00 per person. That’s a total of $1,250,000.
Change of topic (sort of): every day, 25,000 people in the world die of hunger. That’s 9.1 million human beings per year.
So here’s the question: why is the submersible bound for the Titanic heading the news and not the people who are starving?
The five on the submersible have been out of contact for three days now.There are very real fears that they may die,and people who know them are coming on TV and talking about them. In the same three days 75,000 people have died of hunger, but the news outlets haven’t reported the death of one, as far as I know.The people in the submersible are very rich and chose to get into the vessel and go down there to view the Titanic. The people starving to death are very poor and definitely did not choose to join a legion of starving people.
And yet we wring our hands. We scan the news anxiously, to see if the banging noise heard recently could be the trapped submersible crew, and fervently hope they’re saved. We don’t bother with the starving people because – well I mean, it’s so boring. It’d be different if they were poised waiting, desperate, as food parcels were flown in to save them.But there aren’t. So we let them die. They didn’t choose this situation, you may be sure. Unlike the five on the submersible.
So final question: what the hell makes the lives of these five immensely rich people more important than the lives of the 25,000 a day who go to death with empty stomachs? Every day.
Maybe it’s because they’re so boring – none of them has money, none of them is being hunted by loads of people in a last-ditch attempt to save them.
Don’t tell me we don’t live in a crazed, massively selfish world.
Can’t argue with your logic Jude (great name) the world is a crazed, massively selfish world. However there are some great people who do try to feed the hungry, we must always remember that. The poor souls in the submersible have their names broadcast all over the media, unlike the starving masses. That probably explains the current fascination with their plight.
Hard to disagree with you. Well said.
There was a similar article in the Washington Post. It contrasted the lives of the hundreds of Pakistani migrants who fled their catastrophic corrupt country to die in horrific circumstances off Greece with that of the multi millionaire Pakistani businessman on board the ill fated mini submarine with dodgy connections at the highest level of government.