“Fifteen hundred people went into the sea when the Titanic
sank from under us. There were
twenty boats floating nearby, and only one came back. One. Six were
saved from the water, myself included.
Six. Out of fifteen
hundred. Afterward the
seven-hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait – wait to die,
wait to live, wait for an absolution that would never come.”
A good sad movie should leave you with something. A sense of hope. A catharsis. “Titanic”, the movie based off of the actual ship, doesn’t
provide that for me, though I know it does for others. I don’t cry when I watch the
movie. I just sit there with a
hollow sense of depression and a Celine Dion song stuck in my head. So much hopelessness and futility
permeates those final scenes as water fills the boat, as people wait to drown,
as people scream for help in the freezing ocean while those who steer the
lifeboats paddle away and refuse to turn around. The lifeboat pilots had an excuse. Surely, as one character reasoned, if they had turned around
the boats would have been swarmed by desperate people. The boats would have gone under.
Oh, but wouldn’t it have been worth it to try? To attempt to save even just one more
life? To release even one more
person from the cruelty of the freezing water? Would you be able to live with yourself knowing that you
paddled to safety and ignored the dying?
Would it not be better to die than to live like that?
More than six people could have been saved if only those
lifeboats had turned around. But
the lifeboats just kept moving slowly in the other direction because the people
inside counted their own lives, their own safety, as more important than
everyone else’s.
The one boat that turned around got there too late.
Fifteen thousand people. Six were rescued.
Six.
Do you know where I’m about to go from here?
The Titanic is gone.
But there are so many people who are still waiting for a lifeboat. You and I have managed to paddle to
safety, to a world of comfort, plenty of food, of warmth, and of
opportunity. But we’re steadily
rowing our lifeboats away from the people who are trapped and screaming for us
to help them because we count our own safety and comfort as more important than
theirs.
The world had one hundred and forty three million orphans. At least. We have the lifeboats.
They have nothing to do but wait, just like those left in the
ocean. They’re waiting to live or
to die. We can do something. If only eight percent of the Christians
in the world chose to help just one child, the crisis would be over. The children wouldn’t sink. They wouldn’t be left to die. But we’re all still rowing away and
hoping that somebody else turns around.
Somebody else can risk being pulled into the water. And as a result, only a few are
rescued.
The full weight of the Titanic tragedy hits during the scene
when two men row a single lifeboat back out into the ocean. “Is there anybody alive out there?” One calls repeatedly, his voice echoing
across the icy water. “Is there
anybody alive out there?”
“These are all dead,” replies the other. “We came too late.”
We came too late.
Please. Don’t
be too late. They’re calling for
help.
Turn your boat around.
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