Have you heard about the billionaire and multimillionaires trapped on a submersible after spending up to $250,000 each to view the wreckage of the Titanic? Of course you have. The story has been headline news in anglophone countries ever since the vessel, named the Titan, went missing. Enormous resources have been deployed to try to recover the passengers. Every tiny development has been exhaustively covered. Millions of people, myself included, have been glued to the live blogs and rolling coverage. And millions of people, myself included, are now newly minted experts on the difference between a submersible and a submarine.
It’s completely natural to be glued to the Titan story because, obviously, it’s one hell of a story. Yes, the circumstances are unfathomably awful but, also, they’re so unfathomably awful that they seem unreal. The whole thing feels like a movie – like the latest instalment of the Knives Out series. I mean, come on, there’s a billionaire called Hamish Harding involved. The company who made the submersible is called OceanGate: it’s as if it was named in preparation for a massive controversy.
The chief executive of OceanGate – a company which appears to have cut a lot of corners in its quest to build things quickly without regard to boring old safety regulations – is called Stockton Rush. The story seems almost too ludicrous to be true. It seems absurd that people paid obscene amounts of money to get into something which might as well have been called Tiny Little Death Trap.
While it’s only natural to be glued to the Titan story, it’s far from the only recent maritime tragedy in recent weeks. And yet it’s absorbing a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention, empathy and resources. Last Wednesday, one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred on the Mediterranean Sea took place: a fishing boat carrying about 750 people, mainly Pakistani and Afghan migrants, capsized on its way to Italy. There were 100 children below deck in that ship. One hundred children. The exact number of fatalities is unclear: so far we know that 78 people have been confirmed dead and as many as 500 are missing. Those are heartbreaking numbers and yet hundreds of dead and missing migrants have failed to garner anywhere near the amount of attention from the US media as five rich adventurers.
I’m not saying there hasn’t been any coverage of the Greek shipwreck. Of course there has. But it pales in comparison to the attention that’s been given to the Titan’s disappearance. The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.
The Greek coastguard and government officials, in response to criticism of their handling of the disaster, have said that people on board refused any help. Activists, on the other hand, have said the people on board were pleading for help more than 15 hours before it sank. In any case, is it really the job of a coastguard to look at a ship full of desperate people, full of innocent children, and decide they don’t want help? Nobody looked at the Titan and thought: ahh well, they signed a waiver saying they accepted death was a possibility, there’s no point saving them.
Again, the Greek shipwreck is one of the worst tragedies there has ever been in the Mediterranean. And that’s saying a lot, because the Mediterranean is a mass grave. Every year, tens of thousands of people flee poverty and persecution in the hope of a better life and every year hundreds of those people die in the attempt. More than 1,200 people died in the Mediterranean in 2022, and there have been about 25,000 deaths since 2014.
It’s hard to get your head around those numbers, isn’t it? It’s hard to absorb that amount of anguish. And that’s precisely the problem. If you find yourself more captivated by the story of five rich people in a submersible rather than the 750 people who sank on a fishing trawler, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because it’s human nature to feel overwhelmed by suffering at scale; it’s called psychic numbing. As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
The people on that boat weren’t statistics, though. They were human beings who deserve better. They deserve better than being lumped together under the term “migrants”. A term that, the Guardian noted in a recent editorial, “disguises rather than illuminates the individuals behind the label”. They deserve the same sort of resources and attention and empathy that five rich adventurers, who put themselves in harm’s way for the fun of it, rather than because they were desperate for a better life, have had.
Here’s the thing: unless I’ve severely underestimated the number of billionaires with a death wish, I think this is the last story we’re going to see about obscenely rich people going missing in a submersible for quite a while. But I’m afraid I can almost guarantee we’re going to see plenty more stories about ships carrying migrants capsizing.
If anything good can come of these two tragedies, I hope it’s that it makes more people rethink how we value human lives. I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is seemingly more important than hundreds of missing migrants.
I hope it makes us consider the framing around the story of migrant crossings. I hope it makes more people interrogate the ways in which migrants are blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives – and how completely different that is from the empathy afforded to millionaires seeking out underwater thrills.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
