No, not the poorest of taste in jokes considering the latest tragedy of the deep bombarding us from every news outlet, but my knee-jerk reaction when I heard of the five souls lost at sea.
Right out of a Netflix movie script, and you can believe there will be movies to come, the vessel was sitting on the ocean floor, some twelve-thousand five-hundred feet deep when the unthinkable happened.
Except it wasn’t unthinkable at all.
Several people had thought of it, as evidenced by legal waivers which were required to be signed by the five participants.
They were fully aware of what could happen…
The actual end came around noon on Thursday, as all oxygen had most likely been depleted by then, and the submersible imploded in the blink of an eye.
I am sad for those affected by this tragedy and I cannot shake the feeling of senselessness as yet another bored wealthy individual placed such a low value on his (and his progeny’s) lives. Some people call voyagers such as these explorers or visionaries.
I think they are just bored to the point of an incessant urge to push the limit and they have the financial means to do ANYTHING they want.
Hawaii’s beautiful beaches didn’t do it, the sunsets on Bali weren’t enough, the majestic mountains and fjords in the Norse countries fell short, so what’s next?
Nothing now.
It’s over.
But not after losing all communications only an hour and forty-five minutes into their excursion. That means they had over ninety-four hours of oxygen before the lights went out for good. These were scientific-minded people who could count. They could count how much oxygen they had remaining, they could calculate their collective usage rate, and that would produce the number reflecting their own useful lives on this planet. They knew that info for over three days; I just cannot fathom how they were able to get any sleep at all.
So Georgia, which has a stellar civil rights record as you know, is training it’s police officers to shoot at targets of black criminal-looking types, to get them ready for the real deal.
I don’t know how many times I ask myself, “Are you fucking kidding me? Now what did those miscreants do?”
But hey, it is Georgia.
And don’t even begin to think, for one second, that it wasn’t intentional.
Oh hell, no.
Backed by six-hundred years of rape, torture, murder, and the dehumanization of an entire race, THAT is why they are shooting at pictures of black criminals.
The problem is the police can’t seem to tell the difference, so NOBODY IS SAFE.
It used to be, you would see a black man being stopped and you felt a little relieved it wasn’t you; talk about exclusionary racism—I just invented a new term.
I am decades removed from having to worry about police cars or being stopped, but damn if I STILL don’t keep an eye out for any cop as long as I can see them.
Stay well.
