On Real and Recreational Tragedies
Two current news events distill the growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots.
Last Wednesday, a trawler carrying roughly 750 migrants from Libya to Italy capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. At present, 104 of those passengers have been rescued and 81 have been confirmed dead, leaving a balance of around 570 missing people. Most of the passengers were men from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The likely motivation for traveling to Europe was finding subsistence jobs whose pay they’d remit to their home countries.
This past Sunday, a submersible watercraft carrying five passengers on a sightseeing journey to the 12,500 foot deep remains of the Titanic went missing 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The passengers, including one of Pakistan’s richest men and his 19 year old son, paid $250,000 each for the trip. The likely motivation for traveling to the Titanic was possession of more money than they knew what to do with.
The two sea disasters make me think of this Martin Luther King quote:
If our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam and $20 billion to put a man on the moon it can spend billion of dollars to put God’s children on their two feet right here on earth.
How is it that our economic and social structures allow so many to have so little, while so few have so much? Something has to give.
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