The situation in that story could certainly have happened to me, yes…but what exactly are you trying to prove with this line of reasoning?
Simply put, they are not the same thing. I’ll hammer it home again. One is a conscious decision act and a bad decision may get made. The other is an unconscious omission of action. They couldn’t be more different.
Also, to the best of my knowledge no-one has made the claim that being a rapist could happen to anyone whereas a mental aberration like we have suggested can happen to anyone.
But that couldn’t happen to me. Here’s a tip. Just because something happens to 1 or 2 people or .001% of the population, doesn’t mean it could happen to the other 99.999% of the population.
And I disagree. They made a conscious decision to place “thinking about groceries” or “talking on the phone with their boss” or “worrying about dinner” above “thinking about my child’s well-being”
Saying “It could happen to anyone, it’s not my fault” is just a way of getting out of the responsibility of fucking up and leaving your child in a hot car to die.
Sorry for continuing the hijack, but maybe I can cut it off here. The concept that “every man is a potential rapist” does not mean that every man is capable of rape. It means that to a woman walking down the street alone, any man who comes along might be the one in however many who is a rapist. She has no way of knowing if you are that man or not, and may not feel safe because she knows she would not be able to fight you off if you were,especially if she’s been assaulted before. You should not therefore feel personally insulted if she crosses the street to get away from you, and if you do, you’re an idiot. This has absolutely nothing to do with babies left in hot cars.
Sometimes they are - but it seems to depend on intention in those cases as well. My impression is that the cases where I have seen the parents charged as those in which the parents make no real effort to keep the gun away from the kids - the gun was sitting on the coffee table or some such thing. I’ve never heard of the parents getting charged when they forgot to lock the safe or when they kept the gun in a place that one would think was out of the kids’ reach, but they got it anyway.
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I don’t think that “dumb luck” is the right term for it. It’s more a matter of an unfortunate confluence of circumstances and personal dispositions. Even after reading the Washington Post article, i’m willing to bet that there are some types of people, with certain combinations of life experience and personality and current worries, who are more likely than others to leave their kids in cars.
I’m still also comfortable with calling it “negligence” when people do this, even while understanding that it’s probably much more complicated that this one word can encompass.
And it’s less about making an excuse than about arriving at some sort of understanding and explanation of why these things occur. Those things are not the same; i can understand why people do certain things, without condoning the things they do. And your use of the word “conduct” here still seems to imply a sort of intentionality, an unwilling to distinguish between acts of commission and acts of omission, that doesn’t fit these circumstances very well at all.
My argument has never been that every one of these cases should simply be let go, with no consequences for the parent involved. But nor do i think it’s appropriate to march in and blithely declare that anyone involved in a situation like this must be some sort of marginal idiot.
There was a time when, if you had told me i would leave over $2000 worth of camera equipment under the seat of a city bus, i would have thought you were crazy, but i went and did it, at a time when $2000 was worth a lot more to me than it is now. I understand that a child is not a camera, but anyone who reads that Washington Post article and maintains manson1972’s one-dimensional, knee-jerk attitude to the discussion isn’t worth engaging.
Do you? It seems not since you are trying equate forgetting inanimate objects with forgetting your own child is in your car.
And I said I read that article, several times in fact. And I agree that it is a tragedy. I just disagree with the “It could happen to anybody, it’s not my fault” reasoning. I don’t consider it one-dimensional, more like “I know the priority I place on my children, and it would never result in me leaving them in a hot car to die” And really, posters telling me “Yes, you might leave your children in a hot car to die” is rather insulting.
I don’t think it matters, because, I suspect they want a punishment indeed. A retribution for the death of this kid. It’s not a matter of deterence or prevention.
So, you don’t misplace your glasses because you have an alarm system : if you misplace them, you can’t see so obviously you’re going to notice.
Regardless how important your kid is, contrarily to your glasses, you don’t have any innate alarm system that goes off when your kid isn’t at the daycare center.
In fact, rather that showing that this man is more guilty than others, this case shows perfectly what is going on. It’s not that he was so busy all day that he never had a second to think about his child. It’s that as far as he was concerned, his kid was safe somewhere. Even with the alarm going off several times, it never crossed the mind of this father that the kid could be in the car.
And yes, like many others, I’m totally convinced it could happen to you. This father probably thought too it could never happen to him when he was hearing about such events.
OK, after reading that, I’m willing to admit there might be somerare people who couldn’t forget their kids.
I think someone who is obssesive could be like that. Actually thinking every 5 minutes : “is my kid OK?”. During a conversation at home. While cooking. While taking a shower. Taking a phone call at work. So totally obsessed by their children that they’re constantly, relentlessly thinking about them.
But barring being centered on children to such an essentially pathological level, I still don’t buy the “it would never happen to me”.
On top of which, I’ve known people who are fully convinced that they *never could possibly do X nor Y" (X or Y being something much less serious than letting a child die). In fact, I’m thinking of one person in particular. She wouldn’t admit she could. Until I pointed at her doing X. And doing it again. And then Y. She really struggled a lot with the idea. She had totally excluded the possibility that she could all her life. It was a massive disruption of her self-image, and it took her a long time to aknowledge that, yes, she was as faillible from this point of view as other humans. Maybe less than some (like me, for instance), or even less than many, but not infaillible. Nobody is infaillible. Never. Regardless how high the stakes are (like your own children dying).
I tend to picture people in this thread as being like her. In denial. Many sem to say it’s a mechanism of self-defense. Others say pride. In any case, this need to think of themselves as unable to fail in this regard is probably central to their personality. And I assume that unless it happens to them (and I most certainly hope it won’t), they won’t ever be convinced. Like my gf, they would have to demonstrably fail to admit the posibility that they can fail.
I find it strange to the point that I can’t honestly understand how you think that a parent that wants to know where their infant child is at all times is pathological. I mean, do you have any kids? When you took a shower when they were 1 year old, and just starting to walk, did you take a 20 minute shower thinking “I don’t have to think about them, I’m sure they will be okay”?
Sorry, i can’t imagine myself in the shoes of someone that treats every strange man as a potential rapist to the point where they should cross the street.
If I crossed the street because I saw a black person coming towards me, that would be extremely racist, but for some reason, doing so because it’s a man is completely acceptable. I fail to understand this sexist reasoning.
You know, as a chronic forgetter myself, I can actually buy the possibility of there being non-forgetters in this world. I know that in my own household, for instance, there’s a large gulf between the two responsible adults in the house. He really doesn’t forget stuff- he doesn’t forget his house keys, he doesn’t forget where he put his phone, he doesn’t forget to put the parking brake on - I do all these things on a regular basis.
The thing is, though, from the point of view of public policy, it doesn’t actually matter if it’s true that some people honestly truly never forget stuff. You’re outliers. It’s an unusual talent. And a person who’s a potential forgetter cannot turn themselves into a never-forgetter by an act of will. In fact, if you’re a non-forgetter, I would bet that this just feels natural to you. It happens with very little effort. This is unusual. Abnormal, even. The other 99 percent of us can and do forget things. So unless you non-forgetters would like to be responsible for a hundred babies each, we need to figure out as a society how to run things so that normal people- people who can forget things, even vital things like their baby in the car or a parachute on their back- can function with the least possibility of causing disaster
I think most people, the vast majority, if their car alarm goes off, they might check to see what’s going on there. At least the first time. If it’s one of those hair-trigger alarms that everything sets it off, maybe not. But even the fact that it went off multiple times–he didn’t think once, “Maybe I ought to check it out”?
It’s like you’re all saying that if it happens to one person, it could happy to anybody. But it’s vanishingly rare. When my kids were of the age to be in car seats I literally had never, ever heard of it. I had heard of weird brain farts like maybe you put the car seat on top of the car while you adjust something inside, but frankly, almost nobody does that. I couldn’t even get the car seat on the roof of my car, not that I would, because that seems like a fairly dangerous place even if the car is just sitting in the driveway.
On the other hand, it was only when my youngest came along that we had to put their car seats in the back seat. Maybe somebody ought to rethink if that’s really the safest place, if every single parent is at risk for forgetting the kid is back there (and as you may have noted, I don’t think they are).