I Brake For Savage Garden

Defenestration - “from the Latin de (from; out of) and fenestra (window or opening), is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year of 1618.”

Definition courtesy of Wikipedia.

Finally switched over today to Adium from Proteus.  Tried to import my chat histories but kinda failed so I now have a bunch of .html files with all my old Proteus chats.  Not perfect, but it’ll work for nostalgia.
Anyway, Adium has fixed all the quips I had with Proteus: you can hover and read long away messages without having to continually move the mouse off the contact and back on cause it faded out, chat icon stays at the adjusted setting, not something else, jabber actually works (sorry if anyone has been trying to talk to me on there I haven’t been receiving the messages in awhile), and a couple more things.  All in all I should have made the switch months okay.

I tried to explain this idea to someone a while back when one of those car commercials touting a GREAT MPG vehicle (that gets 30MPG…) came on.  It gets me every time that that is considered “great” when we’ve been able to get that for years and years.

The opening of this article compares the growth in efficiency of the computer industy compared to that of the car.  Short but kind of interesting read.

“Sex And The City movie earns $55 million, which will hopefully be donated to help the rising female STD rates & single moms that the show created” - headline from Fark.com

Local6.com Story

For those of you too busy to read the whole article here’s a recap: an eight year old girl, posing as a missing person, sat an a bench in a mall.  Close by was a “Missing Persons” report about her with a picture.  Out of all the mall walkers only a handful  stopped to do anything to help the child; most simply walked on by.

This story gets me for two reasons.  First being the obvious: the child was not helped even though it was, to everyone who saw both the picture and the child, blatant that she was in need of some assistance.
Yet the second problem the story illustrated turns out to be an even bigger one: our society has a(n) (unfounded) fear of child predators.

I wish I could find the link but there was an article a few months back about a child (toddler) who went strolling from her home because someone left the front door open.  A man drove by and saw the child.  With the fear that someone would mistake him for a child predator he quickly drove past the child, opting to call the authorities on his cell phone instead of endangering his reputation.  By the time the police arrived the child had fallen in a pool and died.

The dad of the 8 year old in mall story summed up the sentiments of parents around this country: “On one hand, I wish someone could have stopped to check on a little girl who was obviously by herself,” father Brian Ball said. “But on the other hand, it was nice to see there weren’t a lot of men walking up to her and random strangers.”

Are Modern Kids Coddled?  This is a recap of a New York mum who let her son take the subway home alone one afternoon.  She wrote about it (being a columnist herself) and left the reader with this statement: “As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating—for us and for them.”  She was labeled by the mainstream media “The Worst Mom in America.”
These three stories all culminate on one point: we, as a nation, are terrified that our children are going to be abducted, sexual abused, and then killed.  Yet why do we think this?  Is it because yearly hundreds of thousands of children go missing?  Is it because people looking for a 10 year old girl just go the mall every day and snag children like in some cartoon?

No.

The truth is we are paranoid.  Our kids are being reared in a state of fear that is unfounded.  All though statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, the number of missing persons, abducted by non-family members or friends, is ridiculously low.  We’re talking possibly in the hundreds (source).  And yet we go through life fearing for our kids or worst (especially men) not helping others kids when they need help for fear of being labeled a pedophile.

We need to fight against this.  There’s no reason we shouldn’t go up to a kid at a mall and say hi, or if they’re making faces at you to play back.  If a kid is alone it should be fine to ask him/her where their parents are.  We should be allowed to let them hold are hands if it makes them feel better as we take them to the mall police.  Being trusting as a society is opening us up to being taken advantage of but at what cost do we live in this perptual fear of the unfounded?  Don’t our children deserve to be safer by making men (and women) not fear helping them?  The truth should speak for itself and kindness should win-out against fear.

Remember, if you see a stranger with your child, don’t run up and start screaming and causing a scene.  Get their attention, thank them for watching over your little one, and go about your day.  Heck, buy them a latte: they just helped you keep the most precious thing in your life safe.