Barack Obama Offers a Guilt Trip

I am confident that you have been anxiously waiting to hear what Barack Obama has to say about the Titan submarine tragedy. And you have doubtless been wondering how Obama was going to spin the story to guilt trip white people.

You will not be disappointed. Obama was on television, being interviewed by the hugely overrated Christiane Amanpour, when he attempted to compare the loss of five explorers on the Titan with the loss of life that occurred off the coast of Greece when a boat carrying illegal migrants sank. The death toll there was 700, and, according to Obama, no one noticed and no one cared.

Here is the story:

As a missing submersible with five wealthy passengers received days of nonstop media coverage, more than 700 people are feared dead in one of the worst migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Former President Barack Obama said in a Thursday interview on CNN that the uneven media attention received by the two tragedies was emblematic of the economic inequality plaguing democracies.

Rich vs. poor… no consideration of the fact that wealthy nations earned what they have and that illegal migrants are trying to cash in on someone else’s wealth.

Obama seems to be suggesting, not too coherently, that the wealth of democratic nations was amassed at the expense of poor people. As always, poverty in the south is the result of prosperity in the north. People in the south, people who are invading northern nations, are suffering because of actions that were taken by northern democratic nations.

They are not responsible for their destitute conditions and have every right, Obama thinks, to invade northern countries and to go on the dole. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Sounds like something that the Biden administration is foisting on America, doesn’t it?

Truth be told, we care more about the lost explorers than we do about the 700 migrants. Why is that so? And how did Obama, in his lust to blame white people for the failures of people of color, miss the point?

In a strange way, this brings to mind the famous trolley problem. The thought experiment was concocted by an Oxford philosopher, by name of Philippa Foote in the aftermath of World War II. You know it in one form or another.

Generally, it posits a runaway trolley barreling down the track, heading straight for five men who are working the tracks. It is too late to stop the train, but you can pull a switch and set the trolley on an alternative track. And yet, standing on the other track is a single individual who will surely be killed if you pull the switch. Thus, you can choose between seeing five people die and causing the death of one person.

Now, numerous people have objected to the terms of the problem. They have pointed out that five workers will certainly not stand on the track waiting for the trolley to mow them down. And others have objected that we do not know who the people are. If the one person standing alone on the tracks is your son, the moral calculus shifts in favor of letting the five be killed by the trolley. Are you going to sacrifice your son in order to save five strangers?

If I recall correctly, Foote created this problem to describe the decision that President Harry Truman faced when deciding whether to attack Japanese cities with atomic weapons. He believed that he was facing a choice: either invade Japan and cause the deaths of millions or drop the bombs and kill tens or hundreds of thousands-- and end the war.

Of course, the issue has been widely debated, though precious few Americans thought it was a bad to avoid invading Japan.

So, the moral of this variant on the problem is simply that, being as we are humans, the lives of some people matter more to us than do the lives of other people. The lives of our family members matter more than do the lives of strangers. The lives of our fellow citizens matter more to us than do the lives of foreigners. It feels like normal human behavior, because it is normal human behavior.

This need not be controversial, but Obama seems to think otherwise. He seems to think that we Americans and other Western democracies are responsible for the destitute conditions prevailing in the global south, and thus that we must care as much about those people as we do about our own people.

This is, dare I say, a sophisticated guilt trip. Obama wants us to feel responsible for poverty around the world and to think that we owe the poor peoples of the world something, because we exploited and repressed them. If we are rich and they are poor, that can only mean that we got rich at their expense.

Evidently, this is deranged leftist thinking. Obama does not quite put it clearly, because if he did most people would reject the notion out of hand.