People use the word "tragedy" way too often to describe what amounts to what I would call a travesty. Katrina was a good example: the only tragic thing about it was how the relief effort was handled. And that led to what can only be called a travesty.
They also refer to the recent Ft. Hood mass killings as a tragedy. In reality, it was a catastrophe, one that points to the Army's unwillingness to discharge a doctor because of poor performance and questionable behavior. They need doctors these days, and they might have bent rules and/or ignored warning signs to keep the shooter among the ranks.
In its purest form, "tragedy" refers to ancient Greek plays. They more or less defined the genre, one that still exists today. In the Greek plays, characters were often the victims of fate and fallibility. They could not control their own future, no matter what they did. Their flaws doomed them to misery or death.
I'm not sure if Shakespeare was familiar with the Greek tragedies, but I suspect he might have been. In his tragedies, the protagonists slowly spiraled to their eventual demise, as happened in the Greek dramas. His writing shares with the Greeks the inevitability of the outcome. In some ways, it's like watching a car crash in slow motion.
People routinely refer to the oil geyser in the Gulf as a tragedy or catastrophe. Tragedy implies inevitability, and this mess doesn’t rise to that occasion, except on the flaw side. The flaws could have been easily addressed by a good risk management officer. They were not inevitable.
And while the end results will probably prove to be catastrophic, that word doesn’t describe the devastation adequately, either.
This mess amounts to nothing less than a travesty. Lax oversight by the federal government and the corporations involved led to a travesty. The spill is catastrophic, no doubt. The real tragedy is that an enormous multinational corporation put cash above safety.
11 men are dead, and the Gulf is slowly filling up with oil. That is the real tragedy: the outcome was inevitable, but didn’t have to be.
It didn’t have to happen. But because of the loosening of oversight in earlier administrations, it did. The regulators were too cozy with the companies they were charged with regulating. The conflicts of interest ran almost as deeply as the oil spewing into the ocean.
The Gulf is one my favorite places in the world. Sitting by the sea or wandering out in the surf just enough to get my toes wet makes me happy. It brings me peace. On the beach, I can see forever. Infinity and eternity become real.
I’m afraid I might lose that forever. The region may not recover in my lifetime. That’s where tragedy begins and far from where it ends.
Hundreds of thousands of people are or will be directly affected by the spill. Thousands more will suffer the indirect effects. Not only will fishermen no longer be able to fish, hotel workers will be laid off because they have no one to take care of, as will the waiters that serve tourists and the cooks who feed them. Small businesses that cater to tourists will be devastated and bankrupted, as will anyone who depends on gulf seafood for their livelihood.
This is travesty on a grand scale. It smells foul, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
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