When Told to Abandon Ship, Few on the Titanic Believed the Liner Could Sink
The reactions of the passengers make me think of how we are regarding climate change
What will the faces of the “Earth survivors” look like? Will they be as utterly and sweetly clueless as these two little angels? Long since dead, Louis and Lola lived out their lives according to whatever fate held in store for them. Whether it was one more year or 80, we have no idea.
One thing we do know, though, is that on that fateful night, they were wrapped warmly and lovingly and set into the lifeboats, which carried away most of the first-class passengers.
Will there be a similar escape pod for humans when swathes of our planet become uninhabitable? In some ways, there are already as the wealthiest among us are ever able to find ways to avoid the worst of the intense weather events. Usually, it’s the “second and third-class” passengers among us who suffer the effects of mankind’s hubris, which we just as well can call greed and ignorance.
The overconfidence that drove that massive ship, one of the most extraordinary ones ever to set sail, head-on into fields of ice, blinded by the deep pitch of night, is what today makes that ship on its maiden voyage seem so mythical, if not romantic to us.
Say the name Titanic, and many among us, me included, go to places in our heads filled with never-before-used China, freshly-starched bed linens, carpets that had never been stepped on, and small, porcelain jars that were found only in the suites of the first-class passengers: Inside of the jars was a paste the wealthy used to clean their teeth.
How of many of these wealthy and fanatically clean rich world citizens did a quick scrub of their teeth once told they had no choice but to assemble on the deck among the rest of their peers? It would have been impossible to believe that that ship constructed with such brilliant and sturdy oak, mahogany, steel, marble, and porcelain could somehow have been bested by an object that, if left to sit for a bit in the sun, loses confidence and gives way to water. Oh, but how wrong they were, right?
We have heard the stories and seen it in the classic Titanic movie, where some of the tuxed gentlemen “heroically” sat to the very end sipping on brandy and cognac. Can you imagine the sense of disbelief when one of those men poured out a fresh snifter full of the world’s best French cognac only to catch himself clumsily splashing it around the rim of the fine crystal and landing it on the pristine tablecloth? The ship’s slow but methodical plunge below the water was making its way felt in such minuscule ways.
Like when the third-class passengers trapped below deck suddenly found it more difficult to climb the steps. Nature giveth and nature was taking, and there was nothing that man, in all of the wisdom, classicism, racism, or even goodness, could do to stop the listing of the ship.
Sleepy but roused by what was surely just an exaggerated sense of worry, some in the excited crowds began to regard the moment as a perfect excuse to celebrate, especially when flare after flare was fired high above the ship. Fireworks! I am sure that little Louis and Lola were as thrilled as any little child, then or today, would have been to see the night sky lit up by the soaring rockets. “The rocket red glare” turned all the upward-looking faces momentarily crimson.
Is it just me, or does it now seem like we are standing on the deck of the Titanic, refusing to believe that the ship is–could even–sink? Is it just me, or does it seem like more and more of our fellow humans are finding themselves trapped in steerage, fighting to escape the effects of an earth that warned us decades ago that a dangerous ice field lay ahead–slow down, slow down? You aren’t better than nature just because you have nicer things, bigger houses, and fancier cars.
Some of us will survive the coming climate calamity not because we had more money, a bigger house, or stronger armies but because the randomness of fate permitted us to be called, like Louis and Lola, survivors. There aren’t enough lifeboats for all of us, and it seems avoiding the ice field ahead is already too late. It is now time to think how we can get off of this sinking ship into that icy water, and make it through the night until the rescue ships find us.
The only problem with our story is that no ships will be coming. As we see over and over, refugees in overcrowded ships end up drowned because the world just thought they were shooting off those flares because they were celebrating.
There was a ship on the night of April 15th, 1912, very near the Titanic, that could have made it to the doomed symbol of man’s hubris in a few hours, but it ignored the SOS and flares because “everyone knew the Titanic was unsinkable.”
The ship never came. The rest is history.