RMS TITANIC - THEN AND NOW

When the RMS Titanic departed Southampton, England on April 10, 1912, two thousand two hundred and twenty-three (2,223) people set sail on a vessel carrying lifeboats designed to hold one thousand one hundred and seventy-eight (1,178) individuals. When the Titanic sunk, those lifeboats carried only 705 people to safety. Everyone knows that Titanic's massive casualty list resulted from the absence of sufficient lifeboats, but frequently ignored is the fact that 473 passengers who perished could have been save, but were not, because many of the lifeboats were lowered into the sea with less than a full load of passengers. One boat, meant to hold forty people, departed Titanic holding only twelve. Once in the water, many occupants of those lifeboats refused to pick up passengers who dove into the icy waters of the North Atlantic to escape the sinking ship. The overwhelming majority of those swimmers eventually succumbed to hypothermia and drowned.

The tragic sinking of the Titanic is not unlike today's tragic sinking of our Nation's economy, or the world's for that matter, but history is sadly repeating itself as those fortunate to occupy economic lifeboats callously refuse to offer assistance to those swimming for their very lives.

A case in point was the recent killing of the President's job creation bill by Republicans in Congress. Those Republicans were sitting comfortably in jobs that pay $174,000 per year, with free health care, a generous pension package and as many free lobbyist-funded lunches as their bellies can hold. Is it any wonder that none of them would jeopardize their own safe seat by reaching out to those drowning in the sea around them? I guess not. Little has changed since the Titanic went down.

I'm sure that some will read this piece and cast my opinion aside as just another call for class warfare, but warfare presumes a level of power on the part each combatant that was not present with the swimmers in the waters around the Titanic, and is not present with millions of drowning unemployed Americans today. Titanic swimmers lasted no longer than 15 minutes in the icy North Atlantic. Help didn’t arrive until four hours after Titanic sank. Today's jobless have UC benefits, but those benefits will expire long before good jobs ever replace them. Lifeboats like the President's job creation bill are their only hope.

I admire the President's attempt at job creation. He knows that in trying to pull more people into the lifeboat, his own political ship of state will likely be swamped and sink, but at least he'll know that he went down as a man who sacrificed in an effort to save the drowning, and not as a person who survived by callously rowing away.