That’s right: “They didn’t travel in a submarine, they will die in the most absolute indifference and there will be no media operations or multimillion-dollar rescue devices for them.” The journalist Domingo Marchena has expressed himself in this way on the web. Attached is a work of his in which he states that around 65,000 migrants have died or disappeared since 1990 when they were trying to reach Europe. We read it, we were amazed. We passed after two minutes. Barça and Madrid played each other in the Basketball League.
It is not to belittle the five millionaires trapped in the submersible who paid $250,000 to satisfy their tourist curiosity – almost suicidal due to the safety issues raised – to see the Titanic at the bottom of the sea. He respects them. It does denounce the different scales we have as a privileged society to consider cases according to who is the protagonist.
These 65,000 are reached with recent events. In Kalamata, in Greek waters, hundreds of people drowned. Only 104 were rescued. There were inexplicable things. The boat full of people had been followed from the air for hours and no action was taken in time.
Between the tragedy of the submarine and that of those fleeing from misery there are only four days. The comparative fact comes to mind quickly and is inevitable. We have been in the case one hundred percent of the history of the device, we have seen it, we have read it, we know everything and if they were playing basketball on the TV we followed it in parallel from the mobile phone. We are multiscreen…
The doubt is whether without this possibility that is seen to save the five alive from the submersible before their oxygen runs out, the case would have been as media coverage as it is reported to have been and whether so many resources would have been allocated to rescue -the bear. Or if their status as rich would have been enough, no longer to do live shows, but to play around in the media.
But at their socio-economic level there have indeed been those who have found the pretext for humor. “You don’t have to worry about the millionaires in the submarine, deep down they’re fine,” says @soyneonormal. Other tweeters chimed in: “I’m suffocating with laughter”, “Don’t pass, they must be sinking”. So does @TheOnion: “Coast Guard sends another submersible full of billionaires after first one”.
They are still human lives, but where they have actually found the excuse to laugh at one fact and not the other is that in one there is eccentricity; in the other, despair. They have made them pay, also in this sense, to have gone to see the Titanic.
