Like most Americans, like people around the world, I was glued to the news about the five adventurers who went to the ocean floor on the Titan to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. Such high drama. Such a story. I found myself checking my phone every 10 minutes, eager for any morsel of information about the five men aboard, the conditions on the Titan, the amount of oxygen left, the chances of a rescue. And not to mention the human drama: the father and the son, and, oh, the poor mother, what she must be going through; the interview with the man who passed on the trip and thus survived; the story of the captain. By the time hope was lost, they were no longer strangers but human beings whose lives we cared deeply about and whose deaths we mourned.
Forget about the fact that they really had no business doing what they were doing — that there were too many risks, too many safety issues and no real purpose to the trip other than the sheer adventure. Far be it for us to judge, right? No expense spared in the rescue attempt. A terrible tragedy that captured our heads and our hearts.
In the meantime, hundreds of migrants, desperate for a better life, were trapped on a sinking ship off the coast of Greece, crowded on an unseaworthy vessel by criminal smugglers — men, women and children in desperate circumstances — and we paid almost no attention. I hardly noticed.
How can that be?
Oh, I know the easy answer. One was a TV movie in the making, the kind of small-scale human drama that’s easy to wrap your head around, people who were easier for us to identify with, the kind of mission that captures our imagination.
The other, a mass exodus, a large-scale humanitarian disaster, is complicated and messy and not easily turned into a television movie. It raises difficult questions of how the international community responds to the plight of thousands and tens of thousands of human beings who are willing to risk everything not for the sake of an adventure trip but for the chance of a better life for themselves and their families.
Why don’t we care about them at least as much as we all cared about the five men in the Titan? Why wasn’t the world paying as much attention to the failed rescue efforts off the Greek coast as we paid to the failed effort to rescue the explorers who, truth be told, had no business on the ocean floor?
We are, after all, a nation of immigrants, the sons and daughters, grandchildren and descendants, of people very much like those on the boat, who risked everything in the hopes of finding better lives for themselves and their families. Surely, if we only stopped to think about it, we have far more in common with the hundreds on the sinking ship than we do with the five adventurers willing to pay $250,000 apiece for a joyride on the Titan. Having lived through these two events unfolding simultaneously in real time, have we learned anything at all about what really matters and what doesn’t?
I fear not.
