“What Would I Have Done?”

It was 100 years ago today that James Cameron made the movie Titanic.  It has been a century of soul-searching, angst, and puzzlement that there hasn’t been a sequel.  All of us can remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news of the unspeakable disaster, that the film was going to be re-released in 3D. The tragedy has plagued us with countless questions of ethics and morality and whether or not we can survive another tsunami of Celine Dion screeching from the radio. The question many of us are asking ourselves is “What would I have done?”

Would we have gone to see the film or would we have waited and downloaded it for free some years later as this technology was only the glimmer in the eyes of a few forward-thinking hackers? Would we have heroically stood aside while women and children filled the few lifeboats or would we have tossed out the smallest kids to make room for ourselves…and then tossed out another so that we'd have room for our luggage? Would we have admired the band for playing on in the face of certain death or would we have told them to “take a fucking break already” because they only knew three songs? Would we have cursed our luck and promised ourselves that if we made it out of this jam we would take the next trip on something really safe, like an enormous zeppelin filled with hydrogen gas? Would we praise the merits of the movie in countless conversations in an effort to score points with women or would we go with our gut feeling and say that it was “totally gay?”