An Open Letter to Carnival

I was born mere footsteps from the ocean. No matter where I go, where my feet find their footing, or where my existence is found, I know that I am a child of the sea. I gravitate towards the water in ways only found in men lost in desert sands, clawing through grains for a single drop to ease their scorched throats. I magnetize to the sea, I am drawn to it in ways that confound me. That is why I feel betrayed by what you represent in this world.

I have watched enough films, consumed enough books, and spent enough days out to sea to know that a boat is a precious tool. With it, one can traverse and float across and above underwater mountain ranges. You can collect the spoils of the ocean, and repay your gratitude by treating it with kindness and respect. You can leave the mighty boat, anchor it safely and surf ocean waves with recognition of the sea’s power, and float along with the swell’s current with an ease of mind, knowing that it knows more than you do. A boat is precious; a boat holds stories within the grains of wood used to construct it. A ship is more powerful than the human operating it, for without the ship’s might and heart, its operator is left alone with Atlantic monsters and Pacific giants. No one can harness the ocean, but a ship is kind enough to accept our leadership, so we can explore coasts and canals, bays and bights, fjords and lochs, oceans and seas. The ocean is a wild beast, and we are only so lucky that we are able to see even a small sliver of it in a lifetime.

Yet, you fail to see the sea for what it is. You trap the ocean under your thumb like a caged mutt. Your multi-million dollar vessels, slicing and slashing across gulfs and meres until they are left defeated, drowning in your plastics and oils. You pollute and soil the seas below you, dumping gallons and gallons of vile poison into it as if it were your own garbage bin. You ruin the earth; you impregnate oceans with pollutants. You take what is universal and stab through it repeatedly with your ships until is it laid to waste, disgusting and rotten. You ram into harbors, thrust into ports of impoverished nations, and set up shop on their soil, placing a thin veil over their troubles and their struggles to sell their bodies of land as the Paradise of the Bahamas. I saw you. I saw these things because I was naïve enough to ride your ship without consideration of your intents. I saw babies, naked and filthy, sobbing in their mother’s lap, frightened that their last meal was their last meal. You give these people in your ports scraps while you suckle on billions. You think nothing of where you land, you care not for the people at each stop, and instead sacrifice their time to cater to the folks that “just need a vacation” from their 100k per year jobs in the States. You ravage land and deplete resources for gain, while thousands around you starve, laid atop dirt floors.

You take a boat – a tool that can be precious and edifying, and altogether lovely - and strip away all its heart for a machine. Luxury malls, a liquor bar fifty miles long, an endless buffet, a soulless crew of entertainers and hosts and DJs. They bring artificial life to a deadened engine, wielding smoke and mirrors to a crowd of sunburned vacationers, forcing their eyes to turn to you, because you could not bear to let them look between the cracks and see in their wake a thousand-mile gash of oil and debris. You find desperate singers and depressed comedians and wounded dancers to put on their best face every night, to ride on your boats forever, feeding us bread and circuses until our eyes explode and all our brains can utter is the word Carnival over and over again. You overstimulate us until you desensitize us, and then you stimulate us again. You promise the world and give in return a more broken world. You are a pornography, an opium, a scourge.

I am a child of the ocean. I will return to the ocean when I die, with my ashes mixed into the Pacific. My ashes with break apart, dissolve into the salt and the sea, and I will be the sea. A fish shall inhale me, and I will cling to it, even in some small way. I could be at rest, and my soul would navigate the waters eternally. But it could never be so. I know that someday, without uncertainty, I will find myself attached to you, when your oil and poison infect all the waters of the earth, and the fish I cling to chokes and dies on the scum of a billion-dollar illusion.