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March 04, 2006
We could be heroes?
The other night Mr. PE was watching an episode of that Surviving Disaster series on the Estonia Ferry disaster As it happened he fell asleep and I ended up putting my book aside and allowing myself to be sucked in.
What disturbed me was that unlike many other survival stories, there were very few tales of outstanding bravery or heroism. In fact those who survived mainly admitted that they did so because they focused only on themselves.
One of those interviewed was a committed socialist and peace activist. Previous to the disaster he campaigned tirelessly to save the lives of others and almost dreamed of a situation in which he could put his humanism to active purpose. He freely admits that when that time came, ‘the survival instinct’ kicked in and nobody else mattered except himself. In the reconstruction they dramatised a scene where a woman, trapped under fallen debris begged him for assistance. The ship was capsizing at this point and to get out the passengers had to climb several flights of stairs to the top but of course as the ship was tilted dramatically, this was a struggle against gravity. Many were stumbling and falling with only themselves to carry and the peace campaigner knew that this act of heroism would slow him down, maybe fatally, so the woman remained under the debris and no doubt went down with the ferry.
As it was the Peace Campaigner was one of the last to jump from the ship before it sank to the sea bed, so from a utilitarian point of view he did the right thing, for if he had tried to save the woman they both would have died, yet as he says, morally he has to live with his decision for the rest of his life.
There was another woman who had a sense that something was wrong long before the abandon ship warning went out (which was, by the way, broadcast too late and only in Estonian, a language most of the passengers didn’t understand) and she failed to persuade her friend to evacuate the cabin and then had to get down on her hands and knees and weave her way in and out of the legs of the fellow passengers who were rooted to the spot and begging for help. When she jumped out of the ship, her life jacket broke free and she found someone in the same position, grabbing on to her legs and dragging her down, in a last ditch attempt to float. She had to kick them free and let them drown. Eventually she made her way to a life raft and was rescued some hours later.
Only about 100 of the 952 passengers were rescued. According to the narrator most of them were crew (again, very telling) or strong, well built men in their twenties and thirties. Nobody under the age of twelve or over the age of 53 lived to tell the tale and there was a low proportion of female survivors. The narrator seemed to imply that this was relative to body strength, for even when they escaped the ship the survivors still had to endure many hours in the icy seas before they were rescued.
This diagnosis seemed a little over simplistic and short sighted to me. The featured woman, was evidently slim and petite, although she was a dancer by trade so would have been reasonably fit but I can’t help thinking that the reason she survived was that she was travelling with one friend and so had no familial ties to hold her back. Again the Peace Campaigner was travelling with friends and as hard as it must have been leaving the trapped woman behind, if he had been a mother and that had been his child, would the decision have been so easy? If the dancer had three kids to round up from the cabin, would she have been able to weave in and out as she did? Of course not. If we can talk of the ‘survival instinct’ as the survivors did, then can we also talk of a ‘maternal instinct’ and then ask ourselves which instinct comes out on top when the two are in conflict?
We have already established that if the Peace Campaigner had attempted to save that woman then neither of them would be with us today. We can safely say that if the dancer had a brood of children then she would have been considerably less likely to have survived and in no position to inform us of the tale.
My guess is that the heroes are amongst the 850 odd passengers who did not survive because if an act of bravery or heroism fails and remains undetected and undocumented then that does not make it any the less heroic. And what of the women? Did you spot the hideous mistake above? In my choice of words I worked so hard for a whole paragraph to belittle an imaginary woman’s act of heroism by reducing it to ‘maternal instinct.’ Yes, it seems even I was desperate to define the male as brave but a similar act committed by a woman as inevitable, irrational even, anything but heroic. Surely as women we cannot be heroes - sacrifice it’s just what we - do.
So when I first got sucked in to Surviving Disaster, I was disturbed at the thought that the world might not be as full of heroes as I originally thought or that when it came down to it, I might act in exactly the same way as the survivors of the Estonia. Could I have left my children in that ship to save my own life? From the safety of solid ground I think not but can I really tell? By the time the credits were rolling I had reassessed my definition of heroism to include all those who sacrifice, whatever the gender of the protagonist and whatever the relationship between the saver and the injured party.
Maybe we are all heroes after all.
Posted by purple elephant at March 4, 2006 11:02 AM