Generations of working-class Marylanders watched in disbelief this week as an iconic symbol of their maritime culture crumbled into the Patapsco River
Generations of working-class Marylanders watched in disbelief this week as an iconic symbol of their maritime culture crumbled into the Patapsco River
Generations of Maryland workers — longshoremen, seafarers, steelworkers and crabbers whose livelihoods depend on Baltimore’s port — watched in disbelief this week as an iconic symbol of their maritime culture crumbled into the Patapsco River.
The deadly collapse of the historic Francis Scott Key Bridge has shaken Baltimore to its core.
“What happened was kind of a travesty,” said Joe Wade, a retired port worker who remembers fishing near the bridge as a child. “I’m not a crier, but ... I got emotional.”
Baltimore was a port long before it was incorporated as a city — and long before the United States declared its independence from Britain. Many of the city’s brick rowhouses were built to house fishermen, dockworkers and sailors. They earned a reputation for being pioneering and tough, unafraid of rough seas and long days.
It’s a cultural identity that persists among modern-day watermen like Ryan “Skeet” Williams, who makes a living harvesting crabs from the Chesapeake Bay.
This confuses me. It doesn't even look that nice. I mean if the Golden Gate or Brooklyn bridges collapsed, I'd be all for a loss of cultural symbols and such. This is sort of like crying over the Huey P in New Orleans.
“What happened was kind of a travesty,” said Joe Wade, a retired port worker who remembers fishing near the bridge as a child. “I’m not a crier, but … I got emotional.”
Six men died. But sure, cry over not being able to fish by it anymore.
Don't you think that's an uncharitable analysis? Joe Wade never said anything like what you're suggesting he did, and the journalist wanted to provide supporting context for the headline's claim about a lost piece of Baltimore cultural identity. We also do not have access to the full interview, only a single line of it--Wade could have said something about the workers, only for the journalist to omit it because that is not what the article is about. The interview would have been very different, with different questions and different answers and a different person being interviewed, if the topic had been the people who died rather than the culture of the city.
I know you're capable of better reading comprehension and media literacy than this, and I don't think you hold a personal grudge against Joe Wade, so what's going on in your personal life to make you have such a negative presupposition about the world?
Fine, then the journalist is the callous one. One of those two people suggested that the loss of the bridge is a bigger deal than the loss of life. And whichever one of them did so is the one I am criticizing.
Yeah people get real defensive about inanimate objects but when some people lose lives it's like their empathy turns into animosity and suddenly culture is more important than lives.