Cruise ship drama leaves a sinking feeling

I made a pledge at the beginning of the semester to avoid cynicism, but I’m going to have to risk breaking that rule just once: I found it impossibly difficult to find sympathy for the passengers of the Carnival cruise ship Triumph.

The ship was stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for about five days last week after a fire in the engine room crippled the boat.  24 hour news networks jumped right on the scoop however, and reported on it incessantly.

I hadn’t paid it much notice, but was thrown for a loop and left wondering why they were showing the movie “Waterworld” on CNN.  You can probably imagine my disappointment when Kevin Costner didn’t show up on a jet ski to save everyone.

The stories that started pouring in painted a dismal picture, and for the passengers it was no pleasure cruise.

The fire had also knocked out several support systems on the ship, the lack of air conditioning and backed up toilets quickly made the cabins unlivable.  The  occupants were forced to defecate into buckets and trash bags, and everything smelled like feces and urine.

I think now would be an opportune time to insert a Willy Wonka meme;
“Oh you had to poop in a garbage bag, tell me again how terrible the cruise was.”

My callousness can be dismissed as me being “a jaded and bitter Veteran,” but even my personal experience is nothing when compared to some of the grunts I served with.  I’ll dust the chip off my shoulder momentarily, but humor me for the time being.

I did a supply run once to a tiny Battalion observation post in Afghanistan,  just due east of the middle of nowhere.

We had a refrigerator unit on the back of one of our trucks, so we decided it would be a good idea to throw in a bunch of cases of soda to try and raise the morale a little bit.

The 12 grunts that manned the observation post had been there for more than 5 months, and after we handed them a cold case of soda, they looked at us like we were some sort of wizards.  They had been there for so long, they had literally forgotten what cold was.

That gives a hint of how austere things were, but let me further describe the amenities of their post.

For a urinal, they had a half buried length of six-inch diameter PVC pipe.   The area surrounding the tube was caked with foot powder, a necessity to absorb overflow and odor.

Coupled with the 140 degree heat and swarms of flies, I am sure you can vividly imagine how simply majestic that place smelt.

As for the number two option, a small trash can liner (known as a wag-bag), and a splintery ammunition crate were the closest thing to a toilet on most bases in Afghanistan.

When you were done with your business, you would dump your little gift bag in an empty halved oil barrel.  But wait, there’s more!

Once a day, the Marines would gather and play a game called “Rock-Paper-Rank,” wherein the lowest ranking guy, (usually a Private), would always lose and be forced to take a can of diesel fuel and poor it into the barrel.

After donning gloves, he we would then proceed to light the fuel and fecal matter mixture, stirring it with a steel post until fully disintegrated.

I don’t mean to come off as the annoying angry vet stereotype; I really do try hard to be as humble as possible about my service.  After all, I volunteered and signed a contract on my own free will.

But if our service members can put up with literally crappy-conditions for five months at a time, I don’t see why the cruise ship fiasco was passed off as a national tragedy.

Maybe it’s because it’s easy for news networks to source a story so close to the U.S., or maybe it’s because it costs too much to send reporters to cover the war in “Forgot-istan.”

I personally don’t see how 4000 people trapped in the Gulf of Mexico for five days warrant that kind of news coverage.

Think about it: tens of thousands of people are being trapped, repeatedly, in the “graveyard of empires” for six months to a year.  Few take exception to this fact, that is, unless snipers choose to urinate someplace other than PVC pipe.

So while the rest of America is feigning sympathy for the passengers, I opt to poke fun at this whole thing as a meritless spectacle.

The only thing that could have topped the media circus is if both the NRA and Michael Bloomberg issued statements saying Carnival could have avoided this with more or fewer guns.