Originally Posted by
Jay Knoll
I read the article... life is more complicated now than it was in Melville's time, or Lindberg's days or in the 1800's.
We've got better ways to teach kids than to send them off to a farm or factory at 12. We've got protective services that will come and arrest parents for letting their kids climb cliffs in national parks, or roam the streets at night, or drink a single beer in public. We remove playground equipment that's to hazardous to climb on but was perfectly fine 20 years ago. Families have about 1.9 kids these days, not 5 or 6 or 7 and we don't loose a few to disease or farm accidents or in car accidents like we used to.
The uproar over this stunt (and until it's shown that she had to sail to Australia for a loaf of bread, it was a stunt) is understandable when the people squawking about it know full well that they can't let their own kids ride in a tank of an SUV without a seat belt for fear of being fined or jailed.
I think we do know the motivation. She wanted to do what she knows how to do and the parents calculated the risk that they might loose a child and then let her do it simply for the value of having attempted it at best, and the loss of her life at worst.
The upside.... 15 minutes of fame and a few thousand dollars from the book deal. That's enough, apparently.
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