I think I can honestly say that we have reached the end of the pier as far as civilized life is concerned. I happened to hear a woman in America who is raising money for the obviously distraught family who left their daughter in the back seat of their locked car on a very hot day. The child subsequently died. The point the woman on the radio wanted to make in the face of some difficult questions, was that it could happen to anybody. We were not to judge others. If that is the case than we are truly in the final seconds of the last twenty minutes of The Roman Empire. Alaric and the Visigoths are at the gate.
To say that the failure to remember that a child of yours is in the back seat is on a par with an overlooked bag of apples is impossible to understand.
When in the kitchen later you admonish your spouse by saying:
“Didn’t we buy apples? Oh and something else, I forget. Wait a minute where is Lucy?”
That we must equate a small matter of forgetfulness, with the terrible death by struggling in the unforgiving heat, of a child? Have we gone collectively mad? Has reason fled? Is there nothing in the end, that we will take responsibility for?
I say: Manslaughter.
The woman in question was followed by one of those appalling “Life coaches” who after due thought had written a “helpful” pamphlet on this very subject. She suggested that we should be encouraged to put something that “we could never forget” such as a social media device (Blackberry, I-phone etc.) near or in fact on your child in an effort that both the device and the child not be forgotten and thus broiled in the mid-day sun.
Now I am sure if it was ice cream, one would go straight home to put everything in the freezer, because we all know what a mess the back seat would be if it (the ice cream) was allowed to melt. But a child, who knows how long they take to “melt”?
I fully expect to see children strapped safely in their car seats with mobile phones attached to their foreheads like GO cameras, in order that we remember that one of the family is trapped in the back seat. In the future Grandmothers, dogs, and other valuable things, along with our children of course,those that anyone could forget, will be staring out of a back window of the family SUV with a tablet, Amazon book or phone pressed against their bodies in order to survive. These things are all thought to be helpful.
Stop it. Grow up. This is Manslaughter and jail time is demanded by the Gods.
This is the end.
Goodbye.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2014
Allan Prout
I have forgot my phone. I have forgot my camera. I have forgot my wallet. I have forgot my jacket. I have never forgot my kids or grandkids ………. Yet !