The Carnival Triumph And Our Lack Of Perspective

     The Odyssey of the Carnival cruise ship, Triumph, has thankfully come to an end. I say thankfully for the passengers sake, but more importantly for the rest of the country that had to endure five days of constant reports about the disabled ship in the Gulf of Mexico. I know conditions on the ship were less than adequate, but those people had no idea what we, on land, had to endure.
     While they were drinking themselves silly at an open bar, we had to attend our jobs and the myriad of life's other responsibilities. While they were sunning themselves on the deck of the disabled ship (to my knowledge the power outage on the ship didn't affect the sun and warm weather in the Gulf ) we had to endure one story after another about their personal tales of cruise ship holocaust. And while it was true that they had to endure the smell of spoiling food and human waste, they were passengers on the Triumph, not the Titanic.
     I can think of worst places to spend my vacation than five days on a disabled cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. How about five days trapped on the side of snowy mountain under an avalanche? Or five days in a South American prison after being accused of a crime you didn't commit. How about those hikers a couple of years ago who were unexpected guests of the Iranian Ayatollahs? Talk about a vacation from hell! The worst vacations are the ones from which you do not return, like Natalee Holloway's Aruba vacation in 2005. No one has even been able to locate her body. As far as I know all the passengers aboard the Carnival Triumph have been accounted for.
     I think the Carnival Triumph circus is illustrative of our loss of perspective. This disabled cruise ship dominated the news cycle for five days. All while the very dangerous North Korea fired off another potentially deadly rocket, the looming sequester is illustrating just how dysfunctional our government has become, the anti-Semite military deconstructionist Chuck Hagel is on the cusp of being confirmed the next Secretary of Defense and our imperial President is moving ever closer to transforming the country into one big cruise ship Triumph. In four years we will all be trapped on a once great and luxurious cruise ship that has been turned into a floating port-o-potty.