Titanic

The Titanic sank in 1912. This is not a fact I had to research, its just something I know off the top of my head. I don’t know it because I memorize facts for trivia or because I did a school project on it, but simply because it is one of those phenomenons we all just know about. If you bring up Titanic in a crowded room of people, there aren’t many that would turn to you and say, “What? What boat? Something happened?” In fact, as I was writing this introduction, I took a 40 minute “you wrote 3 sentences, treat yourself to some scroll time” break and saw that Buzzfeed had posted a story about a woman (Violet Jessop), who not only survived the Titanic sinking but also survived the destruction of both of Titantic’s sister ships. I will be reading the full article as soon as I am done here. My point is that even though it’s been more than 100 years since the Titanic sank, we (collectively as a society) are still fascinated by the details of this tragedy.

I think the intrigue with this particular catastrophe come from a few factors:

First, the irony. You describe a ship as unsinkable and it sinks. That alone should be a teachable lesson passed down through the annals of time. Nothing is guaranteed, do not jinx it. It’s like the time the church in my town built a giant 30+ foot statue of Jesus and it got struck by lightning and burned down. Everyone had to joke that Duh, He told you not to build statues of idols.

Second, introspection. It’s a terrible part of human nature to make something tragic that happened to someone else make you think about yourself. At some point we might wonder, what would I have done if I were on the ship? Would I have gone down with it? Would I have hid in my cabin? Would I have given up my seat? There is something unimaginable about knowing you only have a few hours to live, and apparently there are people who chose to accept that and people who chose not to accept that. Unless you are in that position, you can only speculate on what you would do. And while some people chose violence and deception, others chose compassion and bravery. Only the survivors could tell the stories of, She stood up and said this, and I saw him do that.

Last. the people. Even today we are still finding out details about the people who were on board or were supposed to be on board the Titanic. And it seems that most people have a favorite Titanic anecdote. I’m not talking about Jack Dawson/Leonardo DiCaprio and all his hotness and glory, although, I totally get why you’d be obsessed with the movie because of him. I think the human element is part of what makes people so curious about this. The truth is that It could have been anyone on that ship. The passengers were both rich and poor. They were from many different countries. They boarded the ship with different motivations. They had nothing in common and yet—they will always be bound together. And that is what is called a rare collective experience.

So… why am I going on and on about the Titanic right now?

I think because right now with covid-19, we are experiencing another form of collective tragedy. This is happening to all of us. We are all on board this ship— and some of us have lifeboats and some of us are in the water and some of us are like, There is no iceberg y’all are full of shit. I had covid in early December and it took me out. I am vaccinated, but I considered one day that I might die, because it felt like I was dying. And in that moment I figured out what kind of person I wanted to be on the ship.