Join Team Orca!

by C.A. Matthews

It’s not every day that Warming Oceans and the detrimental effects they cause make the news in four separate, but not unrelated stories.  

One would hope that a warming ocean would be as relaxing and therapeutic as a warm bath, but unfortunately this isn’t the case. Warming Oceans can generate more and more intense storms on land—higher winds, more outbreaks of larger tornadoes, more flooding. They can also cause more havoc in the oceans themselves, generating more hurricanes and typhoons, as well as practically boiling microscopic food sources that many aquatic lifeforms rely upon for life, and these lifeforms, in turn, provide food for even larger lifeforms that prey on them.

To put it bluntly, warming oceans means we all are up Shit Creek without a paddle. Warming oceans are yet another component of the climate catastrophe caused by too many greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.  

But what can we do? We’re addicted to fossil fuels to run our power grids. We adore our gasoline-guzzling vehicles. Huge Big Oil lobbyist groups promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry to keep the best politicians that money can buy in charge and in their pockets. We the poor and unconnected are screwed. We could become extinct before you know it.

One of the most intelligent creatures on our benighted planet is the orca. Orcas are the largest member of the dolphin family. These beautiful sea mammals were once labeled killer whales because they can hunt down and consume other sea creatures much larger than themselves, including giant squids and full-grown whales. Orcas, not us, are probably the most successful mammal on Earth. They’ve been around in their evolved state for 6 million years and have no known predator. Except humankind, that is. 

You might remember how adorable the famous orca “Shamu” was, as pictured on SeaWorld posters. Why don’t we see these majestic beasts in aquatic theme parks anymore? If you guessed it was because orcas have actually lived up to their former name of killer whale when it came to occasionally hurting and killing their human zookeepers, you’d be right. 

Highly social creatures, orcas being forced to live by themselves in tiny swimming pools and made to jump through hoops in order to entertain crowds really started to piss them off. You can’t blame the orcas for acting out. Would you like being jammed into a fish pond and kept away from your family members? Of course they got violent in order to express their anger and frustration at their imprisonment. Wouldn’t you? 

In other words, orcas aren’t a creature to ignore or whose actions should ever be taken lightly. We can learn a lot from them.

Orcas hang out together in pods, which are family groups of 50 or more orcas run by a grandmother, and they are highly capable of communicating behaviors with each other and with other pods of orcas. Scientists have always been fascinated at how quickly orcas do communicate with each other and with other pods and how multiple pods can join together to form an even larger army of orcas. 

What’s even more fascinating is that orcas from far distant pods are actually imitating the yacht ramming behaviors that were noted in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Uh-oh. They’ve attacked yachts in the North Atlantic as well.

But orcas are a very adaptable species—they live in every ocean of the Earth, from the North Atlantic down to the Antarctic Ocean and across the wide and woolly Pacific Ocean. You’d think a smart animal like an orca would do just like humans do when climate change causes the place they call home to be less than hospitable to live in. They’d migrate to a better place. 

And here comes the third story of life on the warming oceans I promised. 

Migrants of the human variety cannot simply move themselves from their war-torn and/or climate-ravished homelands and cross oceans to find a new home and make a new life for themselves in another part of the world. No, there are other humans who don’t want these climate and/or war refugees crossing oceans to live in the same country with them. US mainstream media pundits and more than a few politicians label these climate/war refugees “illegals” and “hordes” and “unwanteds”. We are told to fear them and treat them as inferiors, ignore them and send them away. 

Homeless migrants are not welcome anywhere in the European Union apparently, either. Only 104 people have been rescued from a boat that carried an estimated 750 refugees after it capsized on June 13 in the open sea near the coastal town of Pylos. Hundreds of lives were lost, mostly children and their families, when the boat didn’t make it to shore in Greece and the surrounding Coast Guard operations couldn't have cared less about rescuing them. 

This isn’t the first capsizing of a ship full of human beings trying to escape terror that  was denied a safe port in Europe. Over 23,000 refugees have drowned or gone missing while trying to reach European shores between 2014 to 2022, but the real number is probably much higher. No one is keeping records of how many people embark on these deadly journeys in the first place. (Working as an advocate with immigrants in the US, I can’t say it’s any better when climate/war/cartel violence refugees try to cross our borders to find a safe haven here. Read The Unwelcoming Society to see how Americans sometime treat strangers and others.) 

Orcas and human beings trying to escape dangerous situations have something in common—they’re not wanted by the status quo. Those with money and power don’t care if they continue to pollute our oceans and rage war to make their obscene profits. The billionaires/oligarchs simply don’t care if orcas and poor people looking for safety suffer or die, which leads to my last story related to oceans. 

In case you’ve been living under a rock, a “tourist submarine” (I never knew there was such a thing before) imploded and killed a handful of billionaires who wanted to view the wreck of the Titanic in the cold depths of the North Atlantic. These super-wealthy persons (who each could afford a $250,000 ticket) were engaged in “tragedy tourism.” They wanted to go beneath the waves and ogle the ocean graves of hundreds of poor immigrants, unfortunate working class human beings who were stuck in the lower decks and drowned in the sinking of the Titanic. The horrible loss of life happened because the rich passengers were given first pick of the seats on the inadequate number of lifeboats onboard. Only those who could afford first class tickets were considered worth saving apparently. 

This tourist submarine story was repeatedly broadcast on mainstream media outlets every night and day for a week. (Check out Lee and Eleanor’s video for their excellent analysis of this story.) The salaciousness of the taxpayer-funded rescue operation was built up for maximum effect in order to divert attention away from several other embarrassing news stories that came out this past week. It was used as a distraction to keep the working classes from thinking about just how horrible the fate of other workers can be at times. 

Do you recall hearing much about the hundreds of human beings drowning off the coast of Greece? Did you know that US Supreme Court says it's okay for cops to not read you your rights and to keep innocent people in jail? How deep Biden family corruption goes? No, you probably didn't hear anything about it. Perhaps the worst tragedy is that propagandized viewers will never realize how they were manipulated not to see the inhumanity of our treatment of refugees and the corruption happening in US because of the celebrity rich dying in such a novel way. 

At $250,000 a pop, billionaires must really love looking at drowned working class people’s remains and their personal effects lying on the ocean’s floor. In another hundred years or so, billionaires will be taking tourist submarine rides to go down and ogle the corpses of the migrant children lying off the coast of Greece, right? 

The Earth doesn’t need more billionaires and their sycophants. The Earth can certainly do without the Big Oil lobbyists and their ilk, causing global climate change and ocean warming. We don’t need more sociopaths staring at our corpses and giggling over how silly we were to attempt migrating to safer lands that don’t really exist. We the workers, the wage slaves, are the people who make things and grow food and clean toilets—what is it that billionaires actually do to make the world a better place for all? Nothing.

This is where the orcas in their family pods ramming yachts have the right idea. The orcas aren’t taking shit from the bourgeoisie class that causes the most pollution on the planet any longer. And neither should we. (Read The Average Billionaire for data on just how much these super-wealthy persons pollute