“This Will Be Good for You”: A Few Words from the Iceberg That Sank the Titanic

“President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plans hammered global financial markets and U.S. stocks braced for more turmoil on Monday, after he warned foreign governments they would have to pay ‘a lot of money’ to lift the levies he called ‘medicine.’” — Reuters

I know it hurts. I can hear the screams, the crumpling metal. I’m not deaf. I’m an iceberg. What I need from you right now, RMS Titanic, is less screeching and more patience. After the fine bone china settles a few inches into the pelagic sediment, you’ll appreciate the mid-ocean meet-cute we’re experiencing.

Believe me, I get it.

I can sense the creaking of your twisted, ruptured hull as it reverberates for miles throughout the icy Atlantic. When that one guy careened off the propeller and starfished into the salty brine hundreds of feet below, he shook my frozen core as much as it shook yours. If you’re looking for empathy, look no further: one day, as I drift southward into warmer waters, I too will break apart into many pieces, just as you are doing across a calamitous debris field of no less than fifteen square miles.

Sure, your hull is on a catastrophic forty-mile per hour collision course with the seafloor, but could you try stepping back to think of someone else for a change? Consider your fabulous Osler & Co. chandeliers, one of which will become a museum exhibit in New Jersey. Unless you’re an Atlantic City casino in the 1990s, that’s a fantastic place to be.

Back on the mainland, where they have become lackeys to largesse, safe and dry, the news rags will call what transpired between us a disaster. But out here on the open sea, with your open wound, we know this impact is an intervention. It may not seem like it now, as your smokestacks shear violently from the superstructure, and the bodies bobbing above succumb to hypothermia in fifteen minutes or less, but this is a course correction for the history books.

Decades from now, long after the last casualty is nibbled down to mere chum, a Canadian filmmaker with a deep love of the deep, and a singer-songwriter with the pipes of an angel will turn your descent into legend. Your name will glitter in gold across the silver screen. There will be steamy windows, a flying scene at the bow, and more Oscars than you had lifeboats. People will weep for you, Titanic, even as they dissect a wildly inaccurate buoyancy scenario involving a wooden door. Your coal-fired heart will go on. Figuratively, of course. Not much happening down there at 6,000 PSI.

So, please, sink with dignity. Let those last few oxygen bubbles flutter up to the surface as your third-class steerage drowns its way to inspiring a heartbreaking moment in a blockbuster movie. Sometimes the cure doesn’t feel like a cure. Sometimes the medicine doesn’t feel like healing. Sometimes it feels like 52,310 long tons of British steel smooching an iceberg that wants what’s good for you.

Now hush. Swallow that seawater. The medicine is working.