Subhuman

The thing about a man who risks it all. I successfully avoided news of the submersible for a day or so before the sheer volume of the discourse finally caught me, as if the gravitational pull of the blackest hole in space, and dragged me into the news, where I watched in horror as it all progressed: five hopeful explorers of the sunken Titanic, sealed in a metal tube roughly the size of a Subaru, lost several miles down below the surface of the ocean. Or, this is what we thought. If the men were still alive, they had no way to communicate with the crew above. They had no food, no water, no room to fully extend their legs, even, and maybe 40 hours left to breathe. If they lost power, their vessel would be pitch black, and freezing. Then, the more specifically human dangers in a situation so fraught were many, and almost too disturbing to consider. The first impulse of most people who learned of the story was, of course, to empathize. What if it were me, or someone I loved? Terrible. Unthinkable. But while this natural impulse to empathy certainly comprised the reaction of most, it was not universal. To the contrary, and to my initial surprise, hundreds of thousands of people appeared to be… celebrating the disaster. Why, I wondered. What could these men and their families have possibly done to deserve so gruesome a fate? I found my answer soon enough. Two of the adventurers were very rich, it turns out, and therefore not quite human. Other. “Part of the problem.” They deserved to die.