You're the mayor of a small island in a proverbial horror story in New England, and summer is just around the corner. You find yourself at the helm of every Stephen King novel, but you desperately want to be the mayor from Jaws.
For generation after generation people have survived trials and tribulations here, literally cannibalizing each other to survive the cold when needed. But now? The Island is Dying a slow death by attrition and everyone around you is apathetic. They aren't doing anything to change, even when confronted by their imminent demise.
There's no wifi, no jobs, no young people. No Tourists. So it's not because you wish death and destruction on anyone, (the mayor in Jaws didn't either!) but because you know without tourists there's nothing here to keep the town alive after centuries for the next generation.
None that is, except your child.
Your child, frustrated and trapped in a rapidly sinking ship, maybe the last one left here who will fall victim to the curse that strikes down everyone born to the island who steps foot on any other land. That is, if you can keep them from throwing themselves overboard first.
So is it ethical to entice tourists to the island? To try to shove the massive problems you know can and will kill people under the rug for the greater good of the next generation, to give your kid a chance at playing at semblance of normalcy?
To help them experience the closest thing to the life you, as someone who was able to leave the island in your childhood, were able to experience? To have more people, and globalized foods and more culture and media and experiences to fill the days, even with the heavy cost those things will enact on the world around them?
Even though the damage is done? He can never travel, never visit places you did, never have the opportunities you did, his world will always be a poisoned pill, no matter how much of a gilded cage you are able to make it? In fact, the more you add, the higher the price enacted in blood and human suffering, that indirectly will rest on him as well as you.
What about his future beyond high school? Marriage? Children, if you succeed? Do you continue the cycle further?
You sit in an inn with the ghost of a clown and play a game that reflects upon your own childhood, the trauma, fear and horror he passed down as he imparted stories of the Island and its workings.
"He should never have had children." You say.
The summer is coming, the island is going to get hotter, and you've invited company.
