WE OUGHT TO DOOOOO SOMETHING!

I’ve thought a lot about this story, and the more I think about it, the more I’m just not sure what the point of it is.

And I know it’s an op-ed, which should make finding the point even easier. Nevertheless.

Here’s the gist: Two tragedies occur at sea on the same day. One involves a lot of hubris, rich folks, even more hubris, and the ultimate death of five people. The other involves a lesser amount of hubris, poor folks, long-time crisis inertia, and the possible death of up to 700 people.

I think the point of the article is that while the first tragedy – the loss of an experimental submersible taking five rich people, including the CEO of the “exploration” company to view the remains of the Titanic, resulted in massive media coverage and an expensive search and rescue effort, while the other tragedy attracted little media attention and the result of ongoing minimal efforts to mitigate a slow-motion crisis that’s been underway for years.

That these events occurred on the same day is coincidental. That one event received more media coverage than the other is a product of news media. But the more I look at the tragedy in the Mediterranean that claimed the lives of 700 migrants, the more I think the tragedy lies not in the effort put into the sub rescue or the media coverage it gained, but in the “What, me worry?” attitude that seems to prevail in Europe – where that particular tragedy is one of many that have happened in a slow-motion crisis that’s been occurring over years with a lot of finger-pointing among governments, NGOs, and others without a lot of positive result coming from the effort.

In other words: There’s been a lot of hoo-hah about the level of effort that went into the search for the submersible and the ensuing media circus it became, with a lot of people screaming “If they can spend that much time and money and resources trying to help five people, why aren’t they doing the same for the 700?”

That’s a good question. Why aren’t Europe and the finger-pointing NGOs doing more, causing more hoo-hah, over that slow-motion crisis in their own backyard? There’s a lot of people screaming WE OUGHT TO DO SOMETHING without really doing much of anything coordinated at all. If the United States and Canada can pool resources to look for a submersible, you’d think the 20-odd nations in Europe would be able to come up with something more than boats watching boats until it all becomes too late to do anything about it?

Europe likes to point fingers at how poorly the United States is handling its own immigration crisis. And we are handling it poorly. But it doesn’t appear Europe is doing all that much better, and if they think media coverage of it all is going to make things better, maybe they ought to be talking to the European media about better coordinated efforts, with European governments and NGOs about better cooperation and efforts to save lives and sort out who gets to handle the crisis when it’s still a crisis and before it turns into a tragedy. It would have been a better day for everyone – certainly those migrants – had the submersible story overwhelmed another story of a coordinated effort among nations and organizations that rescued 700 migrants, rather than twiddling thumbs and pointing fingers until those 700 were dead.

And I’m sure there’s a lot of that going on that we just don’t hear about. Maybe effort is better extended in actually helping, rather than complaining about who’s getting the better tragedy public relations on a given day.

That may be happening, as the story points out the EU is "close" to an agreement on handling these refugees. An agreement years in the making. The question we should be asking is "Why is it taking so long?"