Sunday Scribblings 6/5/16

When I saw my first Trump for President bumper sticker, it was on a BMW illegally parked in a handicap spot.

***

My daughters just came back last night from a trip to the North Carolina coast with my in-laws. My oldest daughter brought home a lovely collection of peeled skin from her sunburned legs.

***

My youngest daughter received a labeler for Christmas last year. Labels have popped up all over the house with unique labels. The microwave, for example, has been labelled "FOOD ZAPPER". I was not prepared for the latest label. Our toilet is now labelled "POOPING VESSEL".

***

When I was 2 1/2 years old, my family spent the summer at my grandparents' second home near Rhinelander, Wisconsin. The house was right on a lake in a heavily wooded area. I discovered the joys of hiking that summer. I had not yet discovered the joys of speaking English.

One day I decided to go for a hike with my favorite hiking partner, my grandparents' dog, Thor. All of a sudden my parents realized I was gone. It was resolved when people down the lakeshore called to let my parents know I was standing on their dock throwing rocks into the lake. I had hiked around a half mile down the lakeshore. And I did not yet know how to swim. 

I saw a video this week of a small child who decided he wanted some of the stuffed toys in a giant claw machine. So he climbed up the exit and was sitting in the machine calming throwing the toys he wanted down the exit.

These are both stories of children disappearing when the parent looked the other way for a brief time. There are many other stories like it. Young children are naturally inquisitive but do not yet understand real life dangers. It is so frequent the Animaniacs TV show built an entire bit around it. Mindy's inquisitiveness gets her into trouble, and Buttons the dog gets clobbered while saving her.

Yet when this circumstance results in tragedy, as it did with the loss of a gorilla's life at the Cincinnati Zoo, all of sudden the child's parents are the Worst Parents Ever in the eyes of many of the genius parenting experts on the internet. I would bet none of these anointed experts know the parents or know anything about them other than that their child wandered into a gorilla enclosure.

One awful development on the internet is the quick judgment on the internet from people. What doesn't seem to process is the possibility of a tragic situation. Someone must be at fault. Someone must be to blame. Someone must be punished.

Wrong. Sometimes it is just an awful set of circumstances. Sometimes the natural inquisitiveness of a child leads to an awful situation. Its sad, but not the time where a child should automatically be taken from his parents. That would make a bad situation worse.