This being the 100th anniversary of Titanic, I recalled the first time I saw James Cameron’s movie, watching those passengers face the growing inevitability of their situation, most of them realizing the life-or-death decision had been made for them. Who can forget the gallantry of the ship’s band, playing to the very end; the elderly woman who refused to leave since her husband could not also leave in a lifeboat; or the mother in steerage, singing her doomed children to sleep?
A hundred years later, I feel we began our new century—our new millennium—with less optimism and bravado than our Titanic-bound predecessors. There was 9/11, an unwanted war, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a financial collapse, a couple recessions, and collective dismay over the uncovered moral lapses of our political and corporate leaders. Our first black president was elected, dogged by contentious public discourse, our current election year preceded by a relatively new phenom—the “human mikes” sounding out the grievances of the “99%” at Occupy sites across the world.
Titanic’s great-grandchild was the luxury liner Costa Concordia, in which the captain not only didn’t go down with his ship, he didn’t even bother sticking around to direct search-and-rescue. Instead he reached shore safely ahead of his passengers, hopped a cab, and waited at home for the consequences. At the time I posted on Facebook, “The only thing worst than a second Titanic disaster is the moral Titanic of people not doing what they know to be the right thing when their special skills are most needed.”
It’s been said we now live in the age of narcissism. Does anyone “do the right thing” any more?
Therapists sleep with patients; teachers have been arrested for sleeping with their under-aged students. School shootings and child abductions have become news report staples. Office security cameras routinely capture employees stealing from the company till—and why not, they must rationalize, since their CEOs are walking away with multi-million-dollar compensations (even as their leadership skills have driven their organizations into the ground). During the last recession, I heard no less than five tragic stories about businessmen who suicided rather than face a reversal of fortune. More recently, an armed man in Florida shot an unarmed teen, and it took roughly 40 days of public clamor to convince state law enforcement that you can’t just discharge a firearm into another human being and be sent on your way with an “Okay, thanks, have a nice day.” In the furor, the man who created a movie about doing the right thing did the wrong thing by reTweeting what he believed to be the shooter’s home address.
We live in an age of highly charged emotions. Does anyone do the right thing any more?
Yes, I believe most of us do. We raise our children, educate them, teach them right from wrong by word and by example. We care for our aging parents, tackle the bills, get on our business flights, attend jury duty when asked, pay our taxes when told, show up for work every day. During the daily grind, we encounter a million small infractions of courtesy and civility—on the road, in the markets where we shop, in our workplaces—and yet, as the Titanic ballad says, our hearts will go on.
Another love song said it well for me, although I think of it in terms of life’s possibilities rather than romance: I will go down with this ship / I won’t put my hands up and surrender / There will be no white flag above my door / I’m in love and always will be. *
Get up every day and persist. Persist because you love life and your family. Persist—and by so doing, learn how to save ourselves, whether that means finishing up on a degree, finding another job, leaving a bad relationship, getting out of debt, or just working another 8-hour day. The life-or-death decision of our times is not about finding our way to a lifeboat that will deliver us, but simply to persist. The decision to persist is our lifeboat.
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