Titanic Disaster

 

A little over one hundred years ago, on April 15th, the RMS Titanic, an “unsinkable” ship went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking 1500 people to their deaths.   The ship was built to be the final word in luxury and modern opulence.  Yet, like all the luxury liners of the day, she was designed to make her real money in transporting hundreds of immigrants in steerage class.  Catering to the wealthy, the Titanic sought to muscle through on style and hubris instead of substance and careful planning.  It didn’t work. 

Four days into the crossing and 600 miles south of Newfoundland, the Titanic hit an iceberg, flooding five of its sixteen “watertight” compartments.  The supposedly unsinkable ship went down in two and a half hours.  Most of those who perished did not drown but died of hypothermia in the freezing water.  A few miles from the Titanic, and in a good position to save most, if not all, of the passengers, was the S. S. California.  This ship had sent the Titanic its first warning of icebergs and shut down its engines to wait for daylight.  The California had seen flares and lights from the Titanic but ignored them.   So instead of being saved, over 1500 people died a painful death.  Those who were placed in lifeboats were picked up nearly four hours later by the RMS Carpathia.  There were so many things that went wrong.  Those who saw problems coming marginalized their concerns.  Those who raised alarms were ignored.  The veracity of timely warnings was weighed against economic expediency and dismissed, until it was too late.

            The story of the sinking of the Titanic has been told in eighteen movies.  There have been over 200 books, both fiction and nonfiction, written about the Titanic. The resting place of the ship, with no commercial value associated with it, has occupied the time, talent and treasure of any number of specialists.  I have heard Bob Ballard speak to a packed auditorium after he finally found and photographed the sunken Titanic.  The only sound you could hear from the audience was an occasional gasp. 

Where lies the fascination?  We all know the ship doesn’t make it.  Yet we want to hear the story again and again.  Is it the failure that intrigues us?  No.  It is the people.  We want to know how they show their humanity in monstrous times.  We want to see a triumph of spirit in the face of bitter defeat.  We want to know (as in the poem, Invictus by William Ernest Henley) that our heads may be, “…bloody, but unbowed.”  Perhaps we are all trying to learn how to be heroes.         

 Here’s to the heroes who show us how to keep the faith.   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Generation of Serfs

  On October 25, 1415, Henry V of England laid some serious hurt on the French at the Battle of Agincourt at Pas-de-Calais, France.   Part of the success of this campaign was due to Henry’s use of the longbow, but part of it also goes to the creative use of military indentures.   These legal contracts required all the English captains to provide specified amounts of men, material and time to the King’s cause.             An indenture was a document, written in duplicate and then torn along a jagged line, like little teeth ( dents ), in the paper.   One portion of the contract was in possession of each party and when the required conditions and period of service were fulfilled, the parts reunited, and the debt was considered paid.   Many of the people who first came to this country from England came as indentured servants, worked off their debt and became the backbone of the country.             Today we are creating a nation not of indentured servants, someone with a carefully
Read more

Our Beautiful Constitution and its Ugly Opponents

 The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God, I would simply ask them how else so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to devise a way to not only govern themselves, but govern a country that they could not imagine, yet believed would prevail. The constitution of the United States is like a good parent.   It has allowed us to grow up as we have grown older, with the result that the United States of America is the oldest living democracy in the world.   The miracle of this document is that it lives, breathes and moves with the times.   The three branches of our government work together while standing alone
Read more

"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13 th , President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke , Virginia .   The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.   In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.    It was not meant to be a major speech.   That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte , North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.   But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia , President Obama went off message.   Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.   And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.   The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is. I am speaking, of course, of the now famou
Read more