"How dare that mom take her eyes off her baby! I hope mama rots in a jail cell every bit as dark and damp as the well!!"
That is not at all what America was saying 32 years ago when 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell 22 feet down an abandoned well in Midland, TX. She was trapped for two and a half days, during which a microphone was lowered down to hear her singing and crying. On Oct. 16, 1987, she was at last pulled to safety as a massive audience watched on live TV. Vice President Bush visited her. Pres. Reagan made a phone call.
In this brilliant essay, author Maria Reppas considers how much more massive and florid the reporting would be today compared to back when the country was just desperately hoping the baby would live, rather than screaming for the mother's head. Although CNN did cover the story relentlessly, "its coverage would be nowhere near as intense as it would be today." What's more:
CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc. would have self-proclaimed experts, with no direct connection to anyone involved, giving interviews about the conditions, her health, how Jessica was feeling, what she is aware of, what the first responders were feeling, and any other possible detail.
Interviewees would consist of anyone with the tiniest self-proclaimed connection to the McClure family -- relatives, coworkers, high school friends, former teachers, etc. Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper would be constantly flashing computerized simulations of the structure of the well and Jessica’s and emergency personnel’s exact location. Joe Scarborough would be interrupting Mika Brzezinski to try to connect this incident to a Congressional failure on well safety. Fox News would air a few conspiracy theories as to how Jessica got down there or if she was even down there at all. Nancy Grace would gleefully scrutinize the McClures’ teenage marriage and parenting skills, while demanding that Cissy McClure be immediately arrested and prosecuted for harming her child. Every network would be running a Baby Jessica clock that showed how long she had been in the well.
But even more interesting than Maria's imagined media response was her observation about the reaction of regular folks:
Twitter would have multiple accounts floating conspiracy theories, requests for thoughts and prayers, thousands of users claiming they are friends with the McClures, and extreme public displays of grief.
It's those public displays that are so confounding. On the one hand, isn't this the empathy we all believe in -- a reminder that we're all connected? On the other hand, isn't there something disturbing about vying to look the most distraught? What is it that makes our over-the-top "connecting" so suspect? Is it the emotional overkill? The desire to be part of a story one is not actually a part of? The ability, unavailable in 1987, to post our thoughts to the world?
Or is it something else?
We'd love you to think about this with us -- and about any other changes in the way we react to child tragedies and near-misses today. One easy reference point is the incident where the kid fell into the gorilla enclosure. The rush to condemn the mom was breathtaking. So please share your thoughts on how we weigh in on child tragedies. Thanks! -- L.S.
They probably today would have scolded her for not keeping a better lid on the well today. Nothing new. Kids are supposed be robots and parents are super human who can see the future and keep the bad stuff from happening. Oh and girls are sluts
How our culture responds likely depends on what else is in the news cycle.
I can push any tragedy off the front page by creating a different story that will likely lead with “The Politician I Don’t Like is Bad.”
This is all completely accurate on what would happen today. What a monster we have created… how can we ever stop it? I was just thinking yesterday, darkly, how nowadays we look back to the good ol’ days of free-range parenting, few screens and simpler lives. I was thinking this as I threw a piece of non-recyclable plastic in the garbage can, and it occurred to me how my kids might look back at right now as the good ol’ days when we had the ease of using disposable items, could drive anywhere in a car, and parents actually had the time to hover over their kids because that seemed like the most important thing. Life might be so drastically different that we laugh back at the time when media had nothing better to cover than frivolities like kids sitting in a car alone for 5 minutes.
I’m not even a parent and I’ll probably never be a parent at this point of my life BUT it pees me off to no end just how judgmental of parents Americans can be, even other parents, when tragedy strikes a child. The toddler killed by the alligator at a Disney resort is a good example. It was an extremely rare type of tragedy that has never happened before at any resort, let alone Disney, but that didn’t stop people from shredding the grieving parents to bits, even calling for their incarceration. Do people honestly believe they have NEVER taken their eye off their young child, even for a split second, when a rare type of tragedy could have happened to their kid too?
Apparently the more hindsight Americans have about incidences involving kids, the more judgmental they can be. Remember the Thai cave boys? I found it quite ironic that every one of the Thai parents of those boys were supportive of the coach during that whole ordeal despite of his misjudgment in putting those boys in that spot. Had that happened in this country, people would have been calling for the coach’s head and he probably would have ended up in jail and banned from ever working around kids again!
As a parent myself, I think I can say those people don’t “honestly believe” they have never taken their eyes off of a child.
What they’re doing is *telling themselves* they’re better than those parents, because that means those terrible things can’t happen to their kids. They’re dealing with the nightmare possibility of such a thing happening to their own children, by inventing the idea that something within the parents’ control, that they are responsible enough to control but “those parents” were not, is what created the situation.
WOW! That’s powerful!
How did our culture become this way? That’s a difficult debate that’s similar to the chicken and egg circular argument. What complicates this further is our desperation to find the answer also means that we want it to be simple. Things are very complicated and our desperation to find the simple answer makes us overlook the complications.
I enjoy fantasizing about people being tortured. Ok, I don’t but let’s say that I did. I’m entertained by the idea of a person that’s been kidnapped and chained to the bottom of an empty water tank. They’re given a hacksaw to cut themselves free. The lock and chain are hardened steel so therefore they have to cut their own foot off in order to get free! The water tank is being filled. They will drown unless they torture themselves!
Do you see the connection? We are very bloodthirsty about a baby falling into a well. (thirsty for the parent’s blood) However, we don’t question movies such as Saw (the paragraph/plot above) or our hunger for police dramas. The popularity of bloodlust has skyrocketed.
The crime rate is at a 40 year low. However, the television crime drama has multiplied hundreds of times! I remember when it was a rare occasion to see an actor die. How many times does it happen today? This is entertainment. It’s shown because people want to see it.
This makes me think of a message I read on my local NextDoor email list. A woman (with no children of her own) was complaining about how often she saw parents take their kids to the pool and then allow those children to be swimming without a parent within arms reach of the kids. She was beside herself at the danger those children were in and pronounced that the reason she needed to make her personal worries about their safety a subject for the entire neighborhood to discuss was that she just loved those children so much, she couldn’t stand to see them in such danger.
What she did was absolutely misuse the word love. She did not love those children at all. That’s a pretty bold claim for me to make, so let me lay out my evidence. She did not know the name of a single one of those children. She did not know their ages. She did not know their swimming capabilities. She did not know where they were on their road to independence. She never made them a lunch. She never tucked them in at night. She never did a single thing to help any one of those children at any point. If a person can love, and yet do absolutely nothing of benefit for the object of their love – absolutely nothing to connect or be a part of the life of the object of their love, then love has become an absolutely meaningless term.
Complaining on the internet is not a sign of love. It is a sign of neurosis; a sign that a person has poor ability to manage their own emotions. It is a sign that they are missing a constructive outlet for their need to connect with other people. It is a sign that their primary source of self-worth isn’t the actions they do in service for another person, but rather the likes and retweets they get off of twitter. Because a person’s public persona and reputation isn’t connected to the things they do, but rather the words they type, people can put themselves forward as moral paragons without having the slightest bit of knowledge of what it takes to be moral in any given situation – and without having gone through the process of building those morals through real world practice. It’s important to note that some of the people online who scream the loudest about condemning the failures of others are people who are morally bankrupt themselves, but because they’re saying ‘the right thing’ at the top of their lungs, people don’t stand up and tell them they’re over-reacting.
Brava!
Please hire this commenter to write an article. This is so well written.
AGREED. Spot on commentary.
seconded!
This is the first time I’m seeing this explanation of what’s wrong with social media.
Spot on.
powerful and 100% true, and well written. This needs to get out there on social media, it’s applies not just to this article, but every “shame” post, and every “this person is being creepy” post. So so true.
if the well wasn’t being used, the drill in Ontario would be that the parents hadn’t spent a few $K to have it filled in. Hopefully they’d wait until the child was extracted before the filling-in, but you never know.
I do not have any children, and solely from casual observation I feel I can say, nobody who expects a parent to keep track of their child at all times has ever really observed children in the wild. They have the attention span of – Oh, look, squirrel! They have next to no situational awareness. They are quite clever when it comes to escaping confinement. And simple parental exhaustion will set in at some point.
Any PARENT who expects a parent to keep track of their child at all times is severely delusional about how well, THEY are managing.
Exactly and children as young as 3 can scamper off in a heartbeat even before mom begins to turn her head! How can people with children forget about this fact?
Brava is my feeling as well! These ‘concerned’ people are about as transparent as a sandwich bag. Although they’re easy to see through, I couldn’t explain (or rather didn’t understand) the concern they hide behind. It’s a lie that’s as obvious as, “the check’s in the mail”. It’s an excuse to badmouth another.
Have you ever seen an unruly dog that humps and shits on everything in it’s path with the owner sitting by and makes excuses for it? Neither have I but it describes how many people manage their behavior. Alayna S described one of these excuses brilliantly and how the emotional part just did whatever it felt like.
Jonathon Haibt describes it as an elephant and a rider. I describe it like a horny dog that has an owner that’s a bullshit artist.
Yeah, right now I’m being chastised on Next Door because I’m asking for evidence about sex traffickers cruising our parks looking for children. It’s a huge and growing problem, you know! If you try to clarify with statistics, it means you don’t want to protect children.
I don’t go on nextdoor for this very reason. I feel it’s worse than Facebook
On a recent facebook post, a gentleman posted a picture of another man who was taking photographs with his cell phone in a public place, he called the man “creepy” and posted his photo. So I asked, did you talk to the man? Did you call the police? Because you are doing exactly what this man is doing, except you are posting his pictures on social media.
His reply was “I am ok with that”
What kind of unbelievable moral superiority does someone have to have to think that everything *they* are doing is for good and everything someone else does is bad, without even know what they are doing?
Then it was “if it was your kids, you would be posting too”
wait, what? Because no one has ever had a picture of my kid in the background of one of their cell phone pictures, ever? I am sure my kids photo has been taken hundreds of times already without me even knowing. His, too.
No one has the ability to think logically because they want to be morally right. Yet they have no idea what that actually means.
“No one has the ability to think logically because they want to be morally right. Yet they have no idea what that actually means.”
This is what I meant when I compared the behavior of some to that of an unruly dog (emotion) that humps and shits of everything in its path while the owner (logic and rational thinking) simply makes excuses for it. They do this because it’s easier. There can be a real power struggle between emotion and rational thinking. Some people throw in the towel, let emotion do whatever it wants, and actually becomes convinced that their bullshit is true.
“Extreme public display of grief”….
This phrase immediately brought to my mind a comparison that seems odd, but on further reflection is perhaps …not: the public performance of grief by the North Korean people after the death of Kim Jong-Il. There of course it was a high-stakes drama acted out for neighbors and friends and police and government, everybody signaling to everybody else their firm loyalty to the state–many probably actually believing and feeling that loyalty, many prepared to spot an unsatisfactory response to report it to aggrandize themselves, or save their own skin in some way. Obviously there are far different circumstances and stakes, and yet….. there does seem to be some similar psychological phenomenon at work here, one in which our societal tolerance to live and let live has contracted, thoughtful individual judgement isn’t respected, and laws and guidelines have creeped past “necessary” into “arbitrary.” The eagerness to judge and report others at the lightest provocation, without knowing them or their circumstances, has grown substantially. Disturbing to contemplate, really.
Death threats, doxing, rage and many more troll type things the world wide web has allowed to be churned up.
I’m 67, I would have been raised in an orphanage in today’s world because my parents would be in jail for child neglect. From the time I was 8 years old, unless I was in school, in church,or in the house my parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing and they didn’t worry. I would get on my pony or my bike and ride for miles, often to the next town. Through woods, abandoned mines, old logging roads, anywhere my mind took me. It was great.
Today the child would have been taken away from the parents, the parents put in prison, the owner of the well sued for hundreds of millions, as well as the company that had built it.
If they’d ever survive prison, the parents would find themselves unable to settle down anywhere, being pariahs anywhere they turn up with mobs assaulting them while the police stand back and do nothing but regulate traffic.
And the president, while praising the emergency services, wouldn’t spend a second of thought on the parents (though the current president may, being a parent himself, but be advised by his staff to never let it be known, and to certainly not call said parents to offer his support as that’d be political suicide).