It's not as if I'm willing to make light of those tragic deaths, because I'm not.
However, in my own perspective as a Black man living in America, I have gone through life understanding that... Well, there are some things that only white people will do... Especially, some rich white people who were willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money to invoke an entitlement to cheat death inside of a carbon fibre death trap 20,000 feet under the sea. All for what, to brag about the experience of taking a gander a murky, century old shipwreck on a flat screen TV? Frankly, I can't help but to regard that as pure hubris and a level of selfishness that's utterly inconceivable.
To me, their fate is not just a cautious tale of having more money than sense. It's a tableau to the intersection of basic white entitlement and excessive wealth.
And what was it not? It wasn't an exercise of existential imperative, like those poor refugees who were lead to their tragic deaths on Mediterranean.
Most people, without either the sense of entitlement or access to great and disposable wealth find much more reasonable pursuits to escape the endemic boredom of existence... They fly to Vegas and blow the mortgage money and the inheritance of their progeny, they go white water rafting on the Colorado River while NOT regarding the dynamic nature of the water levels at any given time, they attempt to play tag with an annoyed bison in Yellowstone Park for Instagram clout. And after all that, most go home to resume their not as freaking loaded humdrum existence. They don't think about the giddy fun of blowing the equivalent of a two bedroom ranch house in the midwest to look at a hole in the ground on flat screen TV at the bottom of the freaking ocean.
Again, as a Black man living in America, the level of excessive risk taking by those poor souls currently communing with Davy Jones is clearly a white people's thing. Setting the aside the notion of how whiteness is centered, especially the aspirational nature of rich, privileged whiteness, one must understand that traveling to the bottom of the ocean in a windowless death trap isn't a universal desire.
Rich white people are built differently and, we have to admit, it's not all good for anyone.
The late submersible crew and passengers may have paid a quarter million each for the privilege of becoming deep sea fish food, but considering the unnecessary rescue operation that ensued, we all as taxpayers have had to foot a bill. If these same rich and whiter-than-white captains of run away capitalism went up into the stratosphere inside of a chartered spacecraft that would have had the bad taste to explode like a Roman candle over a vast swath of populated areas, we all as taxpayers would have had to foot the bill. If Peter Thiel actually built his proposed floating ode to libertarian delusional thinking in the Pacific and it sank, taking more rich white people down with it, we all as taxpayers would have to foot the bill.
It doesn't take much to extrapolate that the risk taking of bored, rich white people can easily elevate to the level of a public menace.
And it's not going to stop... It's only going to get more risky, due to the persistence of rich white aspirational idealism. Elon Musk wants to rely on a portion of taxpayer funds and resources to strand bored rich white people on the Planet Mars.
Doesn't anyone see the problem with all of this? Again, I'm merely speaking outside of the centeredness of whiteness and outside of frames of reference of vast, unencumbered wealth.
I wouldn't know how to stop the problem from becoming bigger, because like of all of you, I'm merely a spectator. Despite that, to me, it's a presents the clear and imperative necessity of the vast white majority to get the white, privileged few under control. The romanticism of gazing lovingly at a corroded shipwreck will not do any of us any favors in the long run.
Anyway... May all the poor souls, rich and poor alike, rest in eternal peace.
|
