One of the podcasts I listen to is The Journal, from the Wall Street Journal. Today: Trapped in the Strait of Hormuz, regarding the 20,000 sailors stuck, for months, unable to pass through the strait.

Frustrating and deeply boring is just the beginning. Often without cell service, most of them rely on journalists for news of what’s actually going on with their situation. Some are facing a shortage of food and basic supplies. And worse, smaller carriers are starting to go bankrupt, abandoning the ships entirely—and the people on them.

The most haunting line is at the end:

We were talking to officials about, like, do you consider these people hostages, right? Because in some ways, they are stuck in the Persian Gulf. Iran is not letting them go home. Aren’t they kind of like hostages in a way?

And the way one [government official] pushed back was to say, no, hostages are valuable. Governments want to get hostages back.

Horrifying.

Nobody is really putting a priority on these people. We talk a lot about the oil. Like when is the oil going to start flowing through the Strait again, so that we can go back to paying lower gas prices?

…the people who make our modern way of life possible, these seafarers who bring us our oil and our goods, they are forgotten…they’re not even as important as the oil or whatever other commodity we’re hoping to get out of the Strait of Hormuz.