Rather not re-float

They want to re-float the MV Princess of the Stars? I’d rather not, if it were up to me.

The proposal to re-float the vessel makes sense only because of its humanitarian aspect – it’ll help recover the bodies. But we all know that this is a business decision. Recover the bodies, sure, but isn’t it pretty obvious that the main point is still to recover the vessel and thereby eventually resume making money with it? Only the unbelievably or deliberately dense would say otherwise.

SO, my proposal is – raise the damned thing; recover the victims; and allow it to settle back to where and how it is situated now. AND leave it there.

Leave it there as a reminder to all and sundry that life is fragile; and that because it is fragile, life must be protected at all costs – especially from crass commercialism and hubris.

Leave it there because the spirit of the law says that the perpetrator of the crime cannot be allowed to profit from the proceeds of his criminal acts; Sulpicio Lines cannot be allowed to recycle this vessel into yet another means to make money for itself; not ever, and especially not when the memory of the people who died in this ship is still fresh.

Or if it’s too morbid to leave in the water ( a feng shui expert once commented that the reason our country persists in the doldrums is many of our modern statuary show people in anguish, or anger, or – in the case of Ninoy Aquino – dying), turn it into scrap iron, and out of that create a lighthouse (or some other monument) that will serve as a warning to all ships not to set sail into a typhoon.

Or if a lighthouse is too pedestrian, why not use the scrap to build a statue of a woman, waiting to welcome her sons and daughters home from the sea?

And in order to round out this list, why not chop the ship up into little pieces to be used as artificial reefs. The imagery should be obvious: out of death, life; that which caused death has been transformed into something which shelters life; swords into plowshares and all that.

Any other suggestions in the comments will be welcome.

Filed under: musings, news, weather, Princess of the Stars, re-float, Sulpicio

Iloilo ang banua ko

Damn you, Frank.

Filed under: environment, weather, Fengshen, flood, Frank, Iloilo, Typhoon