People Dying Horribly Shouldn’t Be A Partisan Issue
How The Events On The Titan Last Week Exposed The Lie In Those Who Argue For Empathy and Equality
Those of who watched the Jeopardy Masters last month were reminded yet again of the delightful personality of Sam Buttrey, who in the space of a year has become one of the most beloved as well as best Jeopardy champions in recent memory. This became very clear after events last week reminded us of what was almost a throwaway interview with Ken Jennings during one of those matches.
Sam told Ken that he had been planning before his son’s wedding intervened, a plan to ride on a submarine and explore the wreckage of the Titanic. Sam, for those non-Jeopardy fans out there, is an associate professor at the Naval Post-Graduate school. He is in his late-sixties and wanted to realize a life-long dream, which his Jeopardy winnings had provided the possibility of.
After the implosion of the Titan on Thursday, fans of both Sam and Jeopardy sought out this clip and there was an outpouring of relief that Sam had not been on that submarine. How close we came to losing him was the tenor of their message, something that I fully agree with. I want you to remember that as I go forward.
When you read articles of so many leftists and progressive websites, they are always arguing about lives being lost and how those deaths are tragedies of a broken system. This outpouring of grief and rage is understandable every time there is another mass shooting, or a hate crime leads to a minority being killed either by a hate group or by authorities. You hear this outpouring of despair about so many issues: how the Dobbs’ decision has endangered the health of million’s of women, how the rise in hate crimes has endangered the lives of so many minorities, how climate change, if not stopped, will lead to the death of the planet. These notes are sounded consistently and frequently on so many sites, and they are particularly loudly struck on this column. It is hard to argue with their despair and rage.
But.
I’ve spent a lot of time — too much, in fact — on progressive websites and columns of leftists over the last few years. And I have also noticed that their concern for life and death stops short when it comes to people they don’t like.
And to be clear, many of them aren’t subtle about it. Throughout the worst of the COVID crisis, I repeatedly received columns from progressive blogs in which they ‘highlighted’ stories of either Covid or vaccine deniers who were very public about their posts on social media. The pattern was consistent: first they’d show posts calling those arguing for quarantine or social distance liars or Unamerican, they would call Covid a creation of the leftist media, they would be berating anyone who tried to treat them and then there would be the final post saying that the person had died. The writers would end their articles by saying that this was a tragedy. But that didn’t do anything negate the purpose of them which was to basically say “these people had it coming.” That they might have had families or friends who would mourn them or whose lives would have the same holes as the families of victims of the hate crimes or mass shootings they argued were tragedies was never mentioned. As far as these sites were concerned, the world was better off without them.
You see this far often on progressive websites and articles on this very column. You see it when you read an article that says states that are governed by Republicans or are red states have more victims of Covid that those governed by Democrats. You see it in stories about how there are more people dying of Covid who watch Fox News regularly. The implication is crystal clear. Those people voted for the wrong person or watched the wrong news media and as a result, they are reaping what they are sewing. There might very well be some of these people in New York and California as there are in Mississippi or Utah, but they will never be talked about. Those people are getting what they deserve.
I’ve talked about the utter disregard so many progressives have for deep red states in general that it’s not worth talking about again. (That will come in another article.) But let’s consider what happened on the Titan. For days, these people were lost at sea. They were aware of that fact, as well as the fact that they were running out of oxygen with every minute. These individuals with each coming minute and hour knew that their death was almost certainly inevitable and were dying in a truly horrible way — they were suffocating to death in a giant metal tube in the middle of the Ocean. They also knew that when the decompression happened, the submarine would explode and their dead bodies would be cast out into the ocean current. Their families would not have a body to bury or a gravestone to mourn at. You would think that’s the kind of thing we can plain and simple regard as a tragedy and horrible.
Instead in the aftermath of the explosion, I was treated to an article on a major progressive website considering this just another example of how the top one percent spend their money on these kind of adventures and die horribly. Then they argue that in another sense, the world is lucky that some people who went out to save them did not get lost themselves and also die. The implication could not be clearer: the world is better off without these rich white people who spent their money on climbing Everest or flying into space or exploring the ocean rather than use their funds to support poor family or you know, be like the rest of the viewers and contribute to progressive causes rather than the GOP.
This in itself is utterly horrifying to read. Then I read some of the posts at this site who didn’t even hide their contempt. One writer asked if they were supposed to feel sorry for the passengers in the submarine. Another — very prominent on this site — actually considered their deaths the inevitable result of a super concentration of wealth. I also read countless posts on these columns basically approving of the sentiment expressed in this article. Very few even bothered with the sympathy of the loss of life.
It is articles like these that make me feel far more concerned about the fate of mankind than anything that I hear from the most partisan politician or the grimmest cable pundit. Progressives and leftists have spent years arguing that conservatives and Republicans are utterly devoid of empathy for everyone, including the people that voted them into office. But if you’re capable of writing an article where you argue that the deaths of five people — any five people — in a horrible incident where they were lost at sea, suffocated to death and then had their bodies destroyed — is not full stop a tragic and senseless waste of life — then not only have you given up the moral high ground, but I’d also question whether you ever had it to begin with.
Just say for the moment Sam Buttrey had been on this sub and among the dead. Would millions of people — Jeopardy fans among them — mourned this tragedy? Or would so many progressives, who might very well not know this, just say that Sam was another old white male, write him under the brush that he must have been a conservative, Trump voter, and say he got was what coming to him? They would probably think so if he hadn’t been a Jeopardy champion.
Death has long been considered the great equalizer. But if you’re going to either celebrate how certain people die or argue that they deserve because of other factors — their social status, where they live, who they vote for, where they get their news — then you have no moral center. I don’t care what side you represent or what good causes you claim to work for; at your core, there is something missing from you. And if you then start advocating for causes for the underprivileged and those who are perennially discriminated against, those who suffer violence, then you have no more moral authority than the people you claim are making the world worse.
I realize arguing that life is precious and is supposed to matter is something that is viewed as hypocritical by the left when it is argued by a conservative talking head or a member of the Freedom caucus. Now, having read articles like over the past few years, I realize their cynicism is not based in hypocrisy but in agreement with the causes they revile. Tribalism has apparently affected so many progressives that they do believe that their base matters more than the conservative ones. They might cage it differently; they might even be right in some of the causes argue for. But articles like this make it clear their arguments are not for equality. Its because they want to protect ‘their people’ more than ‘those people’. And once you’ve decided that their lives matter more than the others, well, to quote a man that one side would denounce as being part of their tribe and another side would argue was never part of theirs, there really isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.
Something to remember when you read one of these clickbait articles, whether from Newsmax or the Huffington Post.