"The Steerage of To-day"

I've been reading about passenger liners. Someone asked me at work the other day what happened to them all, and the answer is, they got scrapped. None of those 19-teens liners are still around because most of them were pressed in to service in WWI and many sunk. The rest were mostly scrapped when their lifespans ran out in the early-mid 30s. They weren't worth maintaining when Americans didn't have the money to sail. The SS Aquitania (a sister ship of the Lusitania) was the last, scrapped in 1950.

But I'm still fascinated with this persisting idea that the passengers in steerage are basically impoverished ragamuffins kept in squalid conditions. That simply doesn't hold true. Compare an experience on third class to a plane ticket in coach. In coach, you sit in the back of the plane, you get no leg room, you get practically no complimentary anything, there are a lot of you back there and you're not allowed up in first class after you go through the curtain. When you go through airport security, you probably haven't got the money to pay extra to avoid all the screenings like rich people in business and first class do. It's not inhumane, it's just cheap.

Same with steerage. They had dormitory style accommodations on most ships, separated by gender. Many liners even asked third class passengers to bring their own food. White Star Line (Think Titanic, not Lusitania) differed in this because they advertised themselves as the most luxurious line, so they offered cabins and a dining room to steerage passengers. Fancy. Shit.

Second class? By and large, they were employees of first class passengers or related to the crew or shipping company in some way. This is literally business class on a modern airplane.

I could, if I wanted to, still book a transatlantic crossing from New York to Southampton, the return trip Titanic never took, on a Cunard ship (White Star Line was absorbed by Cunard in the 1940s). It would cost me a little more than $1000 for a tiny, windowless cabin on the Queen Mary 2- the cheapest option. The crossing would take a week- the same length as Titanic's crossing. The Queen Mary offers the same kind of amenities as your typical Holiday Inn, except meals are included, and, like the White Star Line before it, stresses that this experience is luxurious compared to other liners.

For nearly $20,000 (twice as much money as I've ever had access to in my entire life), I could get a two floor suite with exclusive access to special lounges, dining rooms, and other amenities. That's first class. OK?

The price of a third class ticket to go from New York to Southampton was $36.25. A waiter in Manhattan was making $8 a week (that same waiter might be making $13 an hour now), suggesting that to purchase that ticket today would cost at least $600. That's roughly the same as a Carnival cruise from New York to Bermuda.

Most of us are third class passengers. Most of us don't believe we're also second class citizens.

Progression

"You're tearing it up on that guitar."

"Huh?"

I've never held a guitar before.  I don't know the strings, the chords.  Five minutes ago, he handed me one of his acoustics and told me to play.  I've worked out the first three notes to Happy Birthday.  

"The fingering," he says.  "Most people don't put enough pressure on the string to change the note.  You're figuring it out and you've never done this before."  

A year ago, I didn't want to come to New York.  I've spent the last nine months figuring it out.  Now I have the opportunity to leave and I'm not ready.  

"If you stay here, and you fight and you fight and you get what you came here to do, will that have been worth it?  This is all there is, right?  So why not?"  

I spent three years learning a promise is no good if keeping it hurts.  I'm keeping two promises right now:  find out what you can do; I don't run, I walk away from what's unsustainable.