The yacht and the dinghy in the Aegean: a perfect allegory for the migrant crisis
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Version 0 of 1. It’s a picture of courage. A picture of the human capacity for hope and endurance. But it is also a picture of cold disregard, sleek injustice, and a desperately unequal world. A tiny dinghy floats like flotsam on the big silver-blue expanse of the Aegean sea, as Iranian migrants try to paddle their way from Turkey to the Greek island Kos. As they struggle in their tiny boat, a vast, elegant, hi-tech luxury yacht dwarfs them. It is an image that says so much – an allegory of our time. Two worlds meet, and one passes the other by contemptuously. It clearly doesn’t occur to the people on that huge modern vessel to help the needy adventurers in the small boat. Why would it? Every European news report seems to add to the sense that migrants are a menace and an alien “swarm”. Kos itself has seen cruel and unhumane incidents as its migrant “problem” elicited less than civilised responses. But these people need to get there, must get there. Related: Kos migrants: 'They said they'd give us papers, then locked us in like a prison' Since when was setting to sea in a small boat on a hopeful voyage not considered heroic, audacious, and admirable? Europeans have celebrated the bravery of seafarers for millennia. The Aegean is the setting of Homer’s Odyssey, the first great nautical yarn. But the modern Odyssey of refugees gets little empathy from today’s morally stunted Europe. That big yacht may strike you as a symbol of the one percent, an image of gloating wealth. But it is not. It is the icy embodiment of us all. We who were born lucky, who live in democracies, with economies that are still among the world’s richest, we are all travelling in that slick rich man’s ship. We speed past the unlucky as if this were natural and inevitable. We look away. We let the have nots founder in our wake. Time for another cocktail. |