Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. I think that gives us plenty of time to keep two events in mind: the desperate effort to rescue the five passengers aboard the OceanGate sub and the plight of thousands of refugees attempting to cross land and sea to safety.
The one: a pricey, chosen adventure of known risks in exchange for adventure and the bragging rights of glimpsing the Titanic wreck.
The other: a desperate escape from certain death, the only hope families have of saving loved ones.
No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well. “Home,” Warsan Shire
One blankets the news with stories of science, hubris, and the heroism of first responders. We’re riveted. I’m riveted. Will the multi-million-dollar effort fail? Will it succeed? What would it be like to experience what the passengers are feeling, thinking, fearing?
The other? The humdrum of everyday tragedy, a human toll off-screen except for those same first responders who rescue passengers on failing rafts or who pull bodies from the sea.
This week is also the United Kingdom’s Refugee Week (and yesterday was World Refugee Day-subscribe to my Google calendar for important human rights days).
Today, a German first responder—Pia Klemp, the captain of the Iuventa—faces a twenty-year prison sentence in Italy for helping to rescue more than 1,000 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. She’s fighting the charges on human rights grounds as well as on the terms of the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea, which requires the master of a ship to “render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost” and “proceed with all possible speed to the rescue of persons in distress.”
That’s the same rule we could apply to the rescue of the OceanGate passengers.
What makes one different from the other?
Damned if I know.
UPDATES
“The Bond Trilogy” Kickstarter opens on June 30. I’m raising funds to create two new audiobooks, one for The Hive Queen and one for The Mother’s Wheel. There are lots of fabulous perks for supporters! Please sign up to get a launch notification and updates.
SOMETHING FUN
Last week, I published my interview with Cynthia Surrisi, the author of The Bones of Birka, a fabulous new young adult book about a famous Viking grave. For decades, archaeologists assumed the warrior buried there was male. But DNA tests revealed that the person was female, challenging our contemporary notions about gender identity.
Well, I was scrolling Twitter when I came across this video, posted from Sasha Allen’s TikTok. Well sung!