Titan disappearance stuns the world but what about refugees?

Some of it really has been grim. At least one US television network kept a countdown clock on the bottom right of the screen to indicate when the oxygen supply on Titan would run out, special rolling news broadcasts were dedicated to the search near the wreck of Titanic, so-called experts pontificated on what might be happening deep beneath the waves on live blogs.

A countdown to the air running out on Titan (Image: Screenshot)

Without wishing to diminish the deaths of those five people, it has been interesting to contrast both the media and public reaction to their fate with the reaction to a boat which sank off the coast of Greece carrying 750 men, women and children.

It’s common on social media to read people asking: “why aren’t the mainstream media covering THIS?”, usually while linking to some mainstream media outlet, and it would be untrue and unfair to say the latter incident hasn’t been covered. There is also, tragically, an aspect of familiarity. The old newspaper adage has it: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news”. It’s estimated more than 2,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean last year – though the true figure may be much higher – while it’s not every day a couple of billionaires go missing on a voyage to Titanic.

Read More: Glasgow student onboard missing Titan submersible

Perhaps though we should ask ourselves – both as the media and as the people – why it appears we find it so easy to put ourselves in the shoes of those lost on Titan while being able to largely look past as tragedy unfolds on an almost daily basis on Europe’s border.

It’s been eight years since the world was chilled by the image of two-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee found dead on a beach near Turkey, having drowned as he and his family sought to escape a brutal civil war. Within months though the boy’s father was impugned as a people smuggler, accused of trying to cross the sea to get dental treatment, smeared as someone trying to profit from the tragedy. Some of the darker corners of the internet alleged the whole thing had been faked, and within a year Nigel Farage was standing in front of a poster depicting desperate people trying to cross a border with the words BREAKING POINT.

Even some of the less vitriolic commenters on the refugee crisis will wonder aloud: “how could you put your child in that kind of danger?”, as though you wouldn’t already have to be terrified, desperate, to load on to a boat with hundreds of others and attempt to sail to a country, to a continent, which has made clear it doesn’t want you. Tragic as the demise of the passengers on Titan may be, its occupants were not impelled by some outside force to board the craft, which had not been certified as seaworthy by any regulatory agency. They boarded having paid a reported $250,000 for the kind of experience only the super-rich will ever have access to – Harding had previously flown to space and broken a world record for circumnavigating the globe. Should we blame Mr Dawood for taking his son aboard the doomed vessel? Of course not, but nor should we blame those who do so for far more pressing reasons.

Read More: 'You can see the pain in their faces': Refugees speak to Scottish Parliament

The mission the five were on contains in itself a grisly reminder of the dynamics at play. Of the 1,317 passengers known to have died aboard Titanic, 709 were third-class passengers. They were forbidden from interacting with the first and second-class guests on the ship, with grilled gates installed to keep them to the lower decks. When Titanic struck the fateful iceberg, there was little time for stewards to unlock them and permit people to escape. Around 75 per cent of third-class passengers perished.

Perhaps the issue is not so much a failure of empathy as one of imagination. Who among us can say we haven’t dreamed of what we’d do if we won the Euromillions jackpot – what we’d buy, where’d we’d go, what we’d experience? Most of us know we’ll never go space, or to see the wreck of Titanic, or own a Ferrari but we can imagine it, we can see it on our screens, read about it in our newspapers.

Of course, we can see, read, hear accounts from Ukraine, or Yemen, or Syria but it’s much harder to put yourself in the shoes of someone who feels they have to leave their country behind, make a dangerous journey with their family, often to somewhere where they cannot speak the language, with no guarantee they’ll be met with anything other than a door slammed in the face – if they reach the door at all.

Questions can and are being asked about the lifestyles and excesses of the super-rich, but it doesn’t take away from the fact their deaths were a tragedy. But so is drowning in the choppy waters of the Mediterranean, striving to reach a shore you’ll never touch with living hands. Do you know the names of any of the hundreds who met just that end last week, far less what they did for a living or where they went to school?

There was no live blog for them.