A few days ago some young man did this off the coast of where I live.
A huge whale carcass was floating in the ocean so he jumped from his boat, swam to the whale and sat on it. As one can imagine there would have been sharks around, at the time.
It is with some dismay that one reads the media reports. Almost with out fail he is portrayed and an ”idiot”, “stupid” and “irresponsible”. One newspaper headline read, “What a Moby Dick” when referring to this man.
Have we really lost our way that much and I thought the media is supposed to present other sides of these stories as well. Is the nanny state now so complete and our over regulation in society so complete. We seem to breed a compulsive state of mediocrity in society. What about his adventuresome spirit?
We see media reports of our very courageous soldiers who stormed machine gun nests at ANZAC cove many years ago. Where do they think we get people like that? It’s people like the whale sitter who do that.
And in the words of the Great Captain Kirk:
“We go, where no man has gone before”
Well that is exactly what the whale sitter did. We revere the great explorers like Burke and Wills and Ernest Shackleton. Where do you think they find people to do that? People like the whale sitter do that.
He wasn’t hurting anyone. The worst that could happen was he gets himself killed, but that is what any great adventurer does. It seems people like the whale sitter are the sign of a healthy society. A sign there are people in our society who will – Go where no man has gone before!