Sixty-One: Troubled Waters (03-26-2024)
I woke up at around 03:30 this morning to pee before going back to bed. An hour or two prior, a shipping vessel flagged in Singapore crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing a near total collapse of the fifty-year-old truss bridge. I didn't know about it at the time. After I woke up again, I heard the relatively benign news from my girlfriend while dressing myself. The thought that there were motorists and construction crews on the bridge at the time of the collapse didn't occur to me until later. It's a materially massive but personally relatively minor tragedy. The scale of destruction is high, the scale of death low in comparison to other recent tragedies and infrastructure failures. Three years ago, nearly one hundred died in a condominium building collapse, an death toll in excess of the deadliest mass shooting in US history, and neither holds in cultural memory anymore. Perhaps this bridge collapse, with its tangential similarities to other pop culture events, and physical symbolism, may hold longer. Perhaps it was an intentional act, or a coordinated accident, or a failure of infrastructure. Andrew Tate, known human trafficker, suspects terrorism. Singaporean ship, Singaporean Tik Tok CEO.
In truth, an enormous, ungodly vessel colliding with the pylon of a US-built bridge will, in every instance, result in near-total collapse. The shipping industry's razor thin margins and third-world human capital leads to power outages and navigational mistakes constantly, it is a recent media invention to become obsessive when these logistical events occur. Human death tolls aside.
I am more disturbed by my own personal non-response to tragedy. This event will end as a case study in planning and disaster response, and an engineering oddity for college courses. The people who died will be unremembered by anyone beyond their own families, and the wider communities they have been torn from will be forced to speak of them in hushed tones, their deaths a media embarrassment. Imagine dying in an event that becomes a meme (1). Once, a death in an accident or major tragedy ravished a community, where the VFW, the schools, the community organizations, and well-entwined families lost a node on their social network, and the web became weaker, repaired only through time and engagement in collective grief. I don't know if the same is so true. The mass publicity of death, the media spectacle, the Redditization and Instagram Reeling (2) in all accidents, strips those close to the victim of the opportunity to process the event.
It's pointless to list famous examples of tragedies captured on film. Not five minutes on any major social media platform, and you will be presented with gruesome depictions of death and destruction far more visibly personable than a bridge collapse. Car accidents, shootings, murders, suicides, and more are the new currency of the digital age, interspersed with machine-generated golems and soulless engagement baiting.
Plunging into the cold, black waters of the Baltimore harbor, tired and weary in the wee hours of the morning, because a ship commanded by an industry being optimized thin beyond its ability, drifted aside without power, into a bridge not quite old enough to be ready to collapse on its own, in a culture that your now greatest contribution to will be the grand, unwilling performance of your own death. Grim.
(1) This is not to evoke meme in the humorous sense, but in way of internet infection and cultural talking point, if brief.
(2) Proud of this double entendre