Cruise Jumping
Its odd how once you’ve done or noticed something, related things appear to pop-up everywhere. Like when you come back from a vacation that you think is exotic and rare, only to find that the Discovery Channel has it at #5 on their Most Exotic Retreats list. I know the standard response is, “The references are always there, but you start to notice them when blah blah blah.” Fine, whatever. I’m not going to argue that.
I took my first cruise in February, and I remember peering over the edge of the ship at 2am and thinking, “this isn’t safe at all.” Since that trip I have been reading story after story about people mysteriously falling overboard on these cruise ships. Their bodies sometimes wash up on some distant shore, and sometimes they don’t wash up at all. However all of these incidents are being treated as almost natural causes of death, as if they all fell over the edge during the chest-clenching struggle with a heart attack.
Now I don’t want readers out there to get the wrong idea. I think that people should be completely responsible for their own safety when they are in a non-hostile environment. Falling off of a cruise ship requires a great deal of irresponsibility. What bothers me about this situation is the inconsistency. Specifically, the inconsistency between the response caused by people dying.
Take the death of 13-year-old Brittanie Cecil at a Washington Capitals game a few years ago. That one single death led the NHL to force all 30 teams to install huge nets around the rink to prevent stray pucks from striking people in the stands. I am not aruging that the response was too drastic, because I think that the response was proper. But that was only one death. There have been 5 cruise ship overboard deaths in the last 11 months, and the response has been nothing more than a quiet acknowledgement.
Where are the huge nets? Why don’t we chain everyone’s ankles to the edge of the ship to prevent these things? But more importantly, why do some people’s deaths spark a drastic response while others are simply ignored?
Pradeep Avasthi wrote:
Any Death and response to it have never had any consistancy though out history. You start to see patterns once the cynicism sets in. A million tutsis or COngolese in Darfur don’t garner enough outrage to match one Ron Goldman. Likewise 460 Indians killed in Mumbai Train bombings doen’t bother the world 10th as much as the death of 17 Brits in London does under the similar circumstances. The Simplest equation I found is that the importance of a life is directly proportional to the resources available to the surviving Kinfolk. Jaded? Perhaps. True, you betcha!
Posted 12 Sep 2006 at 2:33 am ¶
Pradeep Avasthi wrote:
Correction - it should be 37 Brits not 17.
Posted 12 Sep 2006 at 2:36 am ¶
Dev Mankad wrote:
I believe that you hit the nail on the head regarding the big picture, Pradeep uncle. But for some reason, the same answer doesn’t apply to the little picture.
Posted 12 Sep 2006 at 9:02 pm ¶