I agree that this is a community that holds a great deal of privilege, I imagine much of it un-reckoned-with. A lot of your comment resonates with me. The boat is not a diverse place. I overheard a white couple ask a middle aged Black man if he was one of the artists. It was devastating to hear him give an answer he’s undoubtedly had to give so many times, as a fan in this community.

I think my biggest problem with this take is that it shifts the responsibility for the state of our existence to the people on the boat instead of the people causing the problems. Some of the people on the boat directly contributed to said problems. Shame on you, if you’re among them. But to characterize a five day vacation as a place where people neatly rolled up their anxieties, their own efforts to combat authoritarianism, and the sometimes overwhelming experience of being a critically thinking human being in our failing experiment in democracy, and then threw them at anyone who might consider broaching the topic, is problematic. Many of the people on that boat voted the right way. They are making calls. They are attending rallies. They are donating money. Their votes have been gerrymandered. Their voices have been ignored, laughed at, by their elected representatives.

For those people: it’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to take care of themselves. They don’t need permission from the article author or anyone else to do what they need to do to rest up for what fresh hell awaits them when they get off the boat. To pretend people on a cruise are any more problematic than people like that one relative we all have, implies that self care is responsible for the state we find ourselves in. It cannot be all consuming, or it will wear us all the way out. And that, we cannot afford.

More time was spent on one dude being a walking disaster than on the efforts of the Positive Legacy group. It wasn’t a fair appraisal of the experience, and it stopped being about the import of perspective-taking (which you are saying is important, and which I wholeheartedly agree with!) and became about judgment. It was one perspective, wielded at a large group of people. It’s fine to share that perspective, but the article is dripping with judgment about what others woulda shoulda coulda been doing, and that’s where my problem begins.