Sliding values

On Saturday, Boyfriend and I attended his office's annual picnic, which is held at a private lake in Raleigh. It's a pretty nice event, with lots of free food, door prizes and games for the kids. This year there was a mechanical bull, too, which proved to be fun for kids and adults alike. There were some carnival games (Boyfriend won me a stuffed tiger on one) and some inflated kids' rides. These included a bouncy area thing (I'm not a kid so I don't know the proper terminology for these things) and a big inflatable slide.

Placed at the far end of the picnic festivities, the slide towered over all the other rides. It was huge and inflated, but this was no ordinary slide. It caught my eye at once. It was a ship, I immediately noticed, and it looked eerily familiar. It wasn't long before I realized what it was. It was the Titanic. It was the Titanic SINKING. Kids could climb up to the top, and then slide down the deck of the ship into the inflated water below.

I'm sorry, but when did a tragedy in which more than a thousand people died become fodder for children's amusements? The thing just disgusted me. And the sad thing is, the kids who slid down the slide probably don't even know what the Titanic was or that a lot of people died (unless, of course, they've seen the movie). I would think that out of respect for the dead, you just wouldn't turn it into an amusement ride for small children. I mean, at the very least, they could have made the ship look more generic.

I didn't have a camera with me, but here's a photo I found on the Web: