April
30, 2020
Today’s
image – There are tens of thousands of crew members on over one hundred cruise
ships stranded at sea. Every nation that could help has shut the cruise
lines out of their ports, and crew members banned from air travel. “No safe
haven insight,” so they can only wait and wonder what will happen to them. I know how hard it is to wait for a day or a
week when things are dicey or dangerous, all viable outcomes in a black box. We
moderns prefer to look ahead and make contingency plans – the training begins
early with a practice that lauds the one year plan, the five-year plan, even
the ten-year plan. Yet if these pandemic refugees had done all this homework, would
the no man’s land they find themselves in now have swallowed like the phantasmagoric
dreamscape they wake to each morning? All they did was show up to work one day,
albeit a day that proved to be not their luckiest. I imagine they must be righteously
pissed, when they are worried and frightened, at the lack of empathy and action
on their behalf.
What
would I do? What can I do? Not a thing. The
socio-economic model to which our transnational free enterprise systems subscribe
does not include a remedy for viral pandemics that appear to thrive on pleasure
ships, creating floating diasporas of stranded and disenfranchised workers. I
read the stories, and my inability to help turns into rocks in my belly. I seek
relief by typing up a rant for my journal. Close the page, and I do the next thing, which
might be taking my dog for a walk or grading some papers. Something is wrong with this picture. Our agents in government contend that they have
their hands full of national problems; the cruise ship companies registered
their vessels in countries that hold no culpability in the crisis, and the crew
members wait, some since the first week of March. Yes, the virus is a stress
test, and another industry seems to in meltdown. Maybe another dinosaur will fall, and perhaps
they can evolve. A thought that rises to me is to refit these ships to be
floating communities for islands as they submerge with the rising sea waters. Yes, it’s good to be nimble in times like
this.
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