Please note: The views contained here-in are the opinion of the author (that would be me) only and are not reflective or endorsed by the company by which I am employed. These views are not to be taken as any kind of an official statement or quoted, reproduced or otherwise referenced as such.
Before you read any further. Please stop and re-read the above. Twice. Take that in. Let it sit. Then continue. That’s how important that statement is.
In other words, this is just my own personal musings and it is incredibly important that that be made obviously acknowledged.
Right. Now that we’ve all got that.
It occurs to me – possibly too late – that I should step up and inform everyone that may be concerned that we are all fine out here on our small floating hotel. There is a lot of fear and paraniod glances floating around the news right now, and some of it may well be legitimate, but from our end – we are fine.
But I have been thinking a lot lately about fear.
Fear is the ultimate means of control really. Whether you are a street thug or a politician the easiest way to get someone to do what you want is to frighten them, and right now the world is very very frightened. The other thing about fear is that it feeds itself, until the small voices of logic are drowned in the tide of self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling terror.
It is the fear that is sweeping the world that concerns me far more than the bug. Please, don’t think that means that I am in any way disregarding COVID or that I don’t think it is something to be concerned about. What I mean is that, if you strip this situation down to the facts: yes it is terrifying that a new disease has taken such swift hold of the planet, and yes it definitely does need to be contained before it does any more serious damage. But the rest of the truth is that the vast majority of individuals who contract this disease will make a full recovery quite swiftly; in fact a large amount of people who contract it will not even know that they have done so. This is not, thank heavens, Ebola.
The reason that the fear and overreaction is of such concern is because it takes away the attention from the comparatively small portion of the population that would be in true danger if they contracted it (or, come to think of it, if they contracted any other infection) – the “weak” members of the herd, those who are very young, or very elderly, those who already have compromised immune systems (I have one family member who has been told they will die if they catch the regular flu!) – are the ones that are ultimately going to suffer from this; and more so because those of us who are perfectly healthy and risk little more than a few days in bed are shoving them out of the way to get to the supplies they need, the hospitals that need to treat them. Not us. We will shove someone out of our path for that last bottle of hand sanitizer, without thinking that maybe, just maybe, we might not really need it. We are turning on our own in an utterly pointless display of self-preservation without showing much in the way of thought through logic. And this is being fed by the media, who – true to form – are holding to the old adage of “if it bleeds, it leads”.
It’s not exactly society at it’s best out there right now.
Which brings me to a very careful, and very general statement. The cruise industry has been hit hard by this. Through – as far as I can tell – no real fault of our own, we are being painted as some kind of a pariah. Now, there is a lot that ‘my’ industry gets wrong, there are a lot of things that I am not remotely proud of and a lot of ways we screw up. I have never been less than honest about the fact that my job is way less flash than it sounds and that often all I want to do is go home, hang up my gypsy-wings and learn to cook a proper meal. But in this case, I feel the need to softly stand up in a corner and say: we are not evil. We take nothing more seriously than the health of our guests. Every crew member I have ever worked with is trained in how to deal with an outbreak of illness onboard, possibly more so than in most other aspects of the hospitality industry, and as we speak everything is being sanitized and double washed more times than you could possibly imagine. If someone so much as touches one of my computers, I sanitize it.
I am not a company representative, I cannot and will not speak for the company, there are proper official channels for that and if you want accurate information, I suggest you look there. But I still feel the need to quietly defend my place of work and simply say this: we are not the bad guys here. We want to help; we are trying to help.
But all of that aside; I think we all know that this is going to get worse before it gets better. Please remember that fear is the worst disease of all. Keep a level head, wash your hands for at least 20 seconds every time it’s necessary (and even if you think it isn’t)…
And above all things…be kind to your fellow humanoids.