How Did You Feel About the People Lost at Sea?

If you're asking 'which people,' that's the right question.

Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash

For four whole days, my stomach was in knots. A tiny submersible craft containing five adventurers in search of the wreckage of the Titanic had gone silent. Every few hours, my phone lit with updates about their possible fate. We were told they had 96 hours worth of oxygen. Their precise location was unknown. It was a race against time and the ocean depths to find them. And sadly, as we all came to learn on June 22nd, the quintet were lost to the depths of the North Atlantic because the submersible had suffered a catastrophic implosion.

Four days prior to the submersible going silent, we learned that a fishing boat carrying 750 migrants across the Mediterranean Sea toward Italy had capsized and sank. The travelers were men, women, and children, of all ages, identifying as Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian, all considered either migrants or refugees. As the boat fell into the sea, the travelers flailed about and most of them drowned - only 104 people were found alive. The death of over 600 people is being called “the worst tragedy ever in the Mediterranean Sea.” And an investigation is underway into whether the Greek Coast Guard, which was close enough to get video and photographic footage of individuals on the boat, did enough to help, or perhaps even caused/exacerbated the problem.

My stomach was not in knots about the migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean. And I want to know why. Yes – I want to do the uncomfortable work of examining these tragedies to understand more about what’s going on inside of me, and inside all of us, and to ask us to ask ourselves what we want to do about it.

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A strange fact of human nature is that the bigger the human tragedy, the harder it is for us to feel compassion or anguish for the loss of individual life. (Or, as Joseph Stalin bluntly put it, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.”)

Psychologists call this ‘psychic numbing.’ You can read about it here. I imagine it’s evolutionarily adaptive - meaning good for us as a trait, in that it helped us survive over time. Point being, if our feeling of anguish and despair increased with every additional death, we would quickly be overcome by catastrophic emotion and cease to function.

So ‘psychic numbing’ partly explains my differential response last week; my mind can far more easily feel feelings about the plight of five people than it can about the plight of 750.

Also, the five were in a submersible underwater and, (we thought), not yet dead when we learned of their plight, i.e., rescuable. Whereas the migrants and refugees drowned rather quickly, and it was only after their death that I learned of them. So, while I feel concerned about the tough situations at home that put people on a trajectory toward seeking refuge in Italy in the first place, and I feel sadness for the six out of seven of them who lost their lives, I think perhaps I wasn’t hanging on every bit of news about the tragedy because in essence, it was over. There was no waiting for news. The tragedy had happened.

In this sense of it already being over versus underway, the five men in the submersible were more like the hundreds of Korean high school students who in 2014 were on a school outing aboard the M.V. Sewol passenger ferry from Incheon to Jeju Island. They were taking videos on their phones and snapping selfies and enjoying themselves as teenagers do when the boat began to list. The loudspeaker told everyone to shelter in place and await further instruction, which never came.

I remember getting an alert on my phone about the Sewol disaster unfolding, and feeling my stomach lurch with bile at the thought of children slowly sinking into the sea, trapped. My mind immediately imagined the anguish of their parents watching the news unfold right along with me, helpless.

The captain and crew of the Sewol jumped ship, and a total of 172 passengers and crew survived. But 304 people drowned, most of whom were the high school kids whose last act was a phone call to their parents.

With the Sewol and the Titanic submersible, my brain flashed with “What do we do?” “What can we do?” “What can be done?” “Who will help?” Whereas with the migrants and refugees on the Mediterranean Sea, my brain told me “It is already done.”

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So is that what explains my feelings – that the fate of those on the boat in the Mediterranean was already sealed by the time I learned of them? Partly, for sure.

But I need to ask myself the tougher question – was their status as refugees and migrants from places I’ve mostly never been to a factor in my being able to read the news and largely move on? That’s the harder question. And I think it’s the one many of us need to ask ourselves and be willing to wrestle with.

For you see, the migrants and refugees on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean had a lot in common with the Syrian and Yemeni men, women, and children, who in the last few years have fled to Europe to get away from war and atrocities in their country. When those refugees got to Europe they were met with closed doors, scorn, and contempt. Yet when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began a year ago, and Ukrainian men, women, and children, were fleeing to European countries, they were welcomed with open arms, given food, and homes to stay in, even toys, and bounteous compassion. Why the difference?

Like “psychic numbing,” the field of psychology offers us a description of why we care less about some kinds of people. It’s called “othering.” You can read about it here.

In examining the differential treatment Europeans gave Ukrainian refugees versus those from Africa and the Middle East, journalist Addie Esposito lands on “othering” as one key cause. Here’s an excerpt from her article in the Harvard International Review:

“Arriving from the Middle East and Africa, non-Ukrainian refugees are often otherized. Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov recently drew a distinct line between the two groups, justifying differential treatment and fostering a sense of Ukrainian exceptionalism:

"These are not the refugees we are used to…These people are Europeans…These people are intelligent, they are educated people…This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists."

You can read the full article here. Can you imagine someone saying that so nakedly? So publicly? Can you imagine yourself having this thought? Might you? Have you? Have I?

President Obama spoke to the discrepancy between the media coverage of the missing submersible versus the Mediterranean tragedy when he was interviewed at Stavos Foundation in Athens as it was all happening:

“There’s a potential tragedy unfolding with a submarine that is getting minute-to-minute coverage, all around the world. And it’s understandable because obviously we all want and pray that those folks are rescued. But the fact that that’s gotten SO much more attention than 700 people who… sank… is… that’s an untenable situation.”

Listen to Obama’s words. Take them into your evolving brain and store them somewhere for safe keeping and for use later. You can read the full article here.

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To me, ‘psychic numbing’ is an adaptive trait that makes sense. But I believe that ‘othering’ is a relic from a less-evolved era of human existence, and that in this twenty-first century where so much is known and so much is possible, we can (and must) demand ourselves to rise above those deep-seated us/them feelings.

I’m going to take my thoughts about the migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean, and the men in the submersible, and the poor and unhoused people my city, and run them through the filter of “psychic numbing” and “othering” and ask myself what I’m capable of.

Let me be the kind of person who seeks out those who are othered and offers them a safe harbor.

That’s who I want to be.

How about you?

xo

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