The scary thing right now is the randomness of my playlist, I did not purposefully choose the song that is currently playing.
Anyway, I became a Titanic historian over all the other shipwrecks, mostly because of the human factor. So now I'm watching this special on NatGeo about the Titanic and how pissed off Bob Ballard is that salvagers are running off with artifacts and damaging the ship further. Well, I don't agree with his views fully. He thinks that we should never touch the Titanic, to preserve it and let people appreciate it as it is. Well people have historical ADD with things that aren't tangible, with things that don't directly affect them. A hundred years from now, no one is going to care less about about the destruction of the twin towers. 50 years from now no one is going to care about the USS Arizona, the USS Oklahoma, and the other ships that went down in Pearl Harbor, that most people don't even know the names of today. People now barely know about the Andrea Doria, and people only know that the Lusitania was a casualty of war.
But that's not the point. The point is, that people will better appreciate the Titanic if they can SEE it's artifacts, up close, in museums. That's what they are for. The memory will live on in the people who see the artifacts first hand. I myself got to see the Titanic museum tour in April of this year, and the artifacts I saw on that tour were much much more powerful than any video or picture, story account or news article on the ship. To leave the artifacts on the Titanic to let them rot and only the wealthy can visit is a great disservice to the people living today, and the 1500 that died on the Titanic the night of April 14/15 1912. The ship is rotting. The ship will no longer exist in a few decades. It will be reduced to piles of bacterial, rusticle waste. But PARTS of the Titanic can be restored and saved if brought up from the ship.
Now a few opinionated things. Bob Ballard is, in my opinion, an idiot for not claiming rights to the ship. By maritime law, he had all salvage rights to the ship once he found it and claimed it. But he chose not to claim it, so that left it open to anyone with the capability of getting down there to yoink whatever they damn well please from the ship. Now he's bitching about them. But he has the right to his opinion, that it shouldn't be disturbed. History should have taught him, though, that people would find a way to get down there and steal stuff.
Secondly, someone stole the plaque that Ballard left as a memorial to those who died, and some ass stole it. According to the show, they likely did it out of spite for Ballard's opinion. I hope they rot in hell for that. I hope their graves get disturbed when they die. That is absolutely senseless. But oh well, people are stupid, selfish jerks, and there's little we can do to change that. Hopefully they'll get their equipment snagged on the Titanic next time they try to steal crap from it. That ought to teach 'em.
That's about all I have to say about it.
