On April 15th of 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg in the Atlantic, taking the lives of more than 1,500 people. Aboard this ship, all were not equal. The wealthy were saved and the poor condemned to painful, restless deaths.

Info from titanicfacts.net

Survivors recall the crew guiding the wealthy to life boats, while hundreds lay beneath them, unaware that a disaster had even occurred. Humanity, as it turns out, comes at a premium. Among the first class passengers, more than half lived to be interviewed by papers and congratulated by royalty. In the third class, just 24% survived — only to return to that same society which had measured their lives as expendable.

Aged it may be, this tragedy teaches an important lesson about the true cost of disaster. While we like to imagine it as a blind horror, whose hand ruins lives without regard to class or color, such is not the case. Simply put, we live in a world where some lives are valued over others. The poor drown, the rich survive. And in spite of a century’s worth of progress, very little has changed.