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Dear Sisters and Brothers,
We were all captivated last week by the round-the-clock drama around the disappearance of the small sub Titan with five people on board aiming to see the wreck of the Titanic deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. The private, vanity excursion was very expensive. Drones, ships and planes were sent to look for the five. Even nations deployed significant resources to find the tiny, lost sub. The five men who died have since been lionized as intrepid explorers.
Just the week before, on June 14, a boat carrying over 700 migrants, including women and children, capsized and sank off the coast of Greece in what the U.N now calls one of the biggest tragedies in the Mediterranean. The asylum seekers came from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Palestine. This elicited a markedly different level of response. The media coverage was far less. The Greek Navy had undertaken an inadequate and bungled response to the distressed vessel before it eventually sank. Hundreds of migrants remain missing. We will likely never learn about their dreams and hopes.
This jarring comparison between the responses to the two tragedies is uncomfortable. Yes, there are reasons why we were obsessed with the submersible. The submersible story is very unusual and connected to the iconic Titanic ocean liner. Sure, perhaps we needed the Titan story to distract us from the distressing tragedy in the Mediterranean, wherein we feel hopeless. Still, the reality remains that our concern for other people in distress is distorted. Not all lives are equal. In study after study, people show more compassion for the individual victim who can be seen in vivid detail than for a comparatively faceless mass of people.
It wasn't wrong to make every effort to save the Titan. What if we similarly spared no expense to rescue the unnamed people drowning in the Mediterranean? Can we not do two things at once?
It is a dark reflection that the deaths of a few rich men is a tragedy. The deaths of hundreds of poor people is a statistic.
Rev. Arden C. Strasser, Pastor
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