Weingarten on a Distinctly Modern Tragedy

WaPo journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten yesterday offered a disturbing, thoughtful, emotionally wrenching account of the tragedy of children who are left in hot cars when their caregivers, usually doting parents, forget that they were there.

For those who wonder how such things can happen, Weingarten explains in both experiential and neuroscientific terms.

For those who wonder why people can be so bitterly committed to the idea that these parents should be prosecuted, Weingarten offers explanation as well, which we quote for its impressive, if unintentional, grasp of what we deem a sound theological view of why some condemn others:

A substantial proportion of the public reacts not merely with anger, but with frothing vitriol.

Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."

Meanwhile, the Ohio Senate is considering a bill that would make leaving a child in a vehicle "negligently" a misdemeanor of various degrees, depending on the degree of harm to the child. We find the proposed statute unsuitably unclear as to whether the act of leaving must be conscious. There is not point to punishing those who, like the subjects of Weingarten's essay, experienced the failure of memory that afflicts all humans, in their rare cases with unspeakably tragic and horrible results. No threat of punishment is worse than the specter of losing a child or capable of making human memory infallible. The law needs an explicit exclusion of acts done without knowledge or intent.

On another front, we commend the organization Kids and Cars for its campaign to raise awareness and find solutions for the tragic deaths of children caused by vehicles that are not in traffic accidents.

Regular readers of this blog will know why SWNID writes of this matter.