The TeeWee has come on with the morning news...
Me: "Did you hear that? Somebody kidnapped a four-year-old out of a St. Louis hospital, and he was next on the list for a heart transplant. Part of the BOLO was that he was wearing a drug-injecting medical backpack with only 24 hours worth of heart dope in it. What kind of monster..?"
RX: "A pervert."
Me: "Or a congressman."
As it turns out, it was the far more common and prosaic non-custodial parent sort of thing. Classy! Folks, can y'all at least wait 'til the kid gets his new ticker installed before you pick him up by the ankles and try to beat each other over the head with him? Thanks, that'd be great.
Just when I think humans have reached absolute rock bottom, they break out the pickaxes and start digging in the sub-basement.
ReplyDeleteWhen I skim the news, most stories about "Gun Violence" are tending to be some Teen-Age GangBangers wasting each other in the Inner City, or it's some soon-to-be Ex-Husband blowing away his Spouse and Kids. Never could understand why someone would want to kill his Family, like the Scumbag who murdered his Wife and Daughter up here at the Cracker Barrel. Just glad this little boy didn't end up in a Ditch.
ReplyDeleteThat's the new Auto-Solomon feature. If you're the kind of idiot who kidnaps your kid from Transplant Row, the child is spared a lifetime of explaining warning labels and cultural references to you because he gets (metaphorically--we're not monsters or anything) cut in half after you've been on the run a few days.
ReplyDeleteBecause you are stupid and possibly evil.
Your last two sentences say it all Tam.
ReplyDeleteThe problem that arises with stories like this is that other parents clutch their pearls and scream bloody murder when I'm not at my daughter's side 24/7/365 to make sure she never gets hurt or stolen or seckshually abused.
ReplyDeleteI think that hovering over my daughter at all times and never letting her learn independence is the greatest disservice I could do as a parent, and yet a lot of people think I need to be dragged before the CPS board for child endangerment because i let her walk to the park on her own (with friends, just no adults) one sunny day.
How do you explain to people that actual cases of strangers taking children are so rare that they are hardly even worth considering, and that abduction cases are nearly always by people the kid knows (family, etc). The old "in this day and age, you can't be too careful" BS forgets the fact that crime against children has plummeted in the last ten years, and that when I was a kid and got to run rampant all over the neighborhood without adult supervision, I was at greater risk then than my daughter is now.
I saw that story about the kid disappearing from her bedroom down in Tucson, and my first thought was "great, now they'll expect me to sleep in her room with her every night."
We live with risk. We have to make logical decisions about those risks based on probabilities and consequences. TO me, the risk that my daughter will grow up a helpless ninny is a greater fear than her being abducted, but stories like this one work against us parents daily.
Oh, and dimes to dollars the kid in Tucson wasn't taken by a stranger... wanna bet?