A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.
It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.
The so-called “refugee problem” would not exist if countries with means would actually deal with the root causes of people fleeing countries without means. In the US it’s much the same with Mexico and other countries south of us.
Their countries are going to shit because of the accumulated circumstances of centuries of colonialist exploitation, and people there are forced to take their lives into their own hands and try to go somewhere else, because staying isn’t an option for them anymore.
Refugees are just a symptom. We need to address the illness itself, or it will never go away.
Sadly, the symptoms make for an easy political wedge issues to score cheap points, and so it remains beneficial for certain politicians to continue ignoring the illness.