Just over a week ago, news broke of a luxury yacht sinking in the Mediterranean. One person was confirmed dead, six missing, all of whose bodies were later found after extensive complex searches.
For several days it dominated the headlines. One of the days, when I checked the front page of the BBC news webpage, it accounted for the top six stories.
No-one, including me, is denying the tragic loss of life and the devastating impact on the family and friends of those who died.
And yet, and yet.
By the end of May, in the Mediterranean, 880 deaths of people seeking safety had been recorded this year (so far). That statistic is likely to be an underestimate and will have increased significantly since. Many are never found, most never identified.
There are no painstaking searches for bodies, no endless analysis of what went wrong, no interviews with families and friends. There are, mostly, no headlines.
There is no recognition that each of those 880+ people is an individual human being with their own character, their own hopes and dreams, their own communities who care about them, and their own stories cut tragically short.
I know people who have made that journey.
Clearly, the people I know are those that survived, although many witnessed en route that others did not.
They tell stories threaded through with darkness, suffering, loss and fear. But they also tell stories imbued with hope and resilience. They tell stories which are fully human.
They have arrived here carrying their gifts and skills, their different personalities, and their dreams of rebuilding a life and contributing to the societies they are learning to try and call home. They carry, in many cases, terrible trauma, but they carry too an irrespressible zest for life.
I believe our communities are immeasurably enriched by their presence, and that our world is the poorer for the loss of all those who didn't make it.
I believe their lives were / are worth as much as that of a millionaire and his friends.
It's hard to explore these subjects without the risk of it being misinterpreted, but it feels important to try. To at least ask the question as to how we got to a place where some lives are considered to be worth so much more than others.
And after that 'starter for ten', to dare to ask how we might at least move in the direction of understanding that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" (Universal declaration of human rights, Article 1) and then begin to act accordingly.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1082077/deaths-of-migrants-in-the-mediterranean-sea/
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