A Pakistani super-rich and his son were unlucky enough to die at sea this week. More than 300 poor Pakistanis were unlucky enough to die at sea in the previous week. We know the names of both. We don’t know the names of the 300. Over the course of four days, half the world was saddened, watching the news to see if the rich were rescued alive. The day we learned the fate of the poor, it was too late for a miracle.
I refer in the first instance, for those readers who might have spent the week on Mars, to the case of the submersible Titan. The five passengers, including the two Pakistani billionaires, died trying to see the remains of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I am referring, for those readers who are not very interested in international news, to the sinking of a fishing boat from Libya in the Ionian Sea off the Greek coast, which claimed the lives of around 400 “undocumented migrants ”, as we call them, most of them Pakistani.
Of less interest, except here in Spain, was the death of 37 more “undocumented” people, this time due to the sinking of a shepherd from Africa that was going to the Canary Islands.
what can we say Two things, for starters. That, everything indicates, there was a thousand times more eagerness in the rescue mission of the small submersible of the five rich than in the rescue missions of the hundreds of poor people. That, without a doubt, the media paid a thousand times more attention to the drama of the Titan snipers than to those who risked everything to reach the European promised land.
I will jump, in a somewhat disinterested way, to the defense of the media. There are two categories of news, as they say in my native country: “Dog bites man and man bites dog”. A dog bites a man and a man bites a dog. Unusually, surprisingly, the second category sells more. The news of those who drowned in search of a better life belongs to the first category. It happens so often that, as terrible as it is, we become numb to it. In 2022 alone, the Canary sea route added 1,800 deaths. Fortunately, there are committed people fighting for the cause of these avalanches of refugees, but there is a widespread feeling among the bulk of the population that their tragedies belong in the realm of life’s natural disasters, such as cancer or accidents by car
Speaking of which, I saw a four-paragraph story this week here in La Vanguardia about a baby who died after being hit by a van in Barcelona. An anecdote compared to the Titan news, to which hundreds of paragraphs were devoted, but it struck me more. I imagined more strongly the pain of the parents of the child than that of the relatives of the five aquatic adventurers.
But here’s the thing. They were adventurers. They were movie characters. The news they generated was a live action thriller. If all five had made it out alive, like the three Apollo 13 astronauts, there would be an auction underway in Hollywood today to see who would get the film rights.
As for the relative lack of interest there supposedly was in rescuing shipwreck victims off the coasts of Greece and the Canary Islands, I don’t know. I don’t have the data, so I can’t comment. I suspect, however, that if the sinking boats had been yachts with billionaires on board, first, a greater effort would have been made to save them, and second, it would have been in the news around the world.
George Orwell writes in, for me, his best book, Animal Rebellion, that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”. The book, published right at the end of World War II, is a satire of the Soviet Union. The comment is of poignant irony. Even in communism, with its promise of equality, there are people’s lives that are worth more than those of ordinary mortals. It has always been this way, whether the system is feudal, neoliberal or Marxist.
Some, Orwell might have added, are luckier than others. Like, for example, Shahzada Dawood, the Pakistani billionaire who died in the Titan minisub. From rich parents, Dawood studied in England and the United States and lived legally, without needing to have had to board a shepherd, in London. The half-million dollars he paid for him and his 19-year-old son to have an underwater adventure could have come from one of the secret accounts he was known to have offshore, a drop in the ocean of his colossal treasure. On the other side of the coin are the hundreds of his compatriots who drowned on the Greek coast who must have paid all their savings to the traffickers who organized the failed trans-Mediterranean expedition. For the former, the investment was a luxury (buying another Lamborghini or titanic tourism?); for the second, a matter of hunger.
The temptation is to get angry. Well, no. I am indignant But for what? The contrast between the two stories, that of rich and poor Pakistanis, offers us just one more metaphor for the countless injustices that surround us. If the outrage serves anything, it is because we do not resign ourselves, that we continue to fight for a world in which fortune is distributed less unequally, or in which more help is offered to the poor to compensate for their bad luck.
There are those who dedicate their lives to the task in a practical way, like the members of the oenages who do what they can to rescue those who arrive in Europe by sea. But what can we non-heroes do about it? Conversing, protesting, shouting, writing and, it seems to me, voting for parties that understand that the rich do not deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor, but that everyone is what they are thanks, above all, to the life’s lottery and that, therefore, you must do what you can to balance the balance. If it doesn’t work, at least we can say that we wanted it, that we did it, that before the death that touches us all the same, the Dawoods and the nameless, we have lived life with an attitude of generosity.
