This past weekend, a four-year-old child climbed through a barrier at the Cincinnati Zoo and fell into a pit in the gorilla exhibit. Harambe, a 17-year-old silverback, grabbed the child and kept him for approximately ten minutes. Onlookers varied in their accounts, describing the gorilla's behavior as alternately protective and threatening, perhaps agitated by screams from the crowd as they watched. In the end, zoo workers shot and killed the gorilla and the boy was taken to the hospital.
The first thing that occurred to me was that trope from old comics, the one where some lady wearing a hat and gloves screams, "Superman, help! My baby!" And then we see that the baby carriage has gotten away from her or whatever and is headed toward to train tracks or the lion cage or wherever it is. (That's a trope, right? I'm not just imagining it, I'm sure.)
The story seemed like a relatively simple one to me, one that simultaneously combined an endangered child with the tragic killing of an animal that is very closely related to us. It's easy to see why the news media picked up on it.
Yet like so many things in the last decade or so, the story has taken on a life of its own, one that might have not happened in a less media-rich world. There were instantly dozens of memes circulating on social media and almost everyone had an opinion on it. Suddenly, everyone was an expert on the behavior of silverback gorillas, had studied the intricacies of zoo design, and were well-versed in zoo-rescue protocol. More than anything though, everyone was an expert parent.
It's such an easy target. I mean, if the bar is, "Well, my child has never fallen into a gorilla pit," then congratulations: you're all parent-of-the-year. I mean, that's rule number one of parenting, right? "Keep your child away from gorilla pits." Everyone knows that.
The near-universal verdict on social media was quick and unforgiving. The fault lay clearly with the mother. She should be punished, arrested, fined, jailed. At least one of my Facebook friends called for her death.
The truth, as is always the case, seems to be a little more nuanced than that. The woman had several kids with her. The child had gotten away and the family was actively looking for him. He crawled through a fifteen-foot barrier of shrubbery to get to the gorilla enclosure before apparently falling in.
Yeah, my gut feeling is the same as a lot of people: I would never let my child get away from me like that. I mean, there are even signs everywhere warning you to keep an eye on your child.
But can we just take a breath for a minute.
I love social media. I'm really not one of the naysayers who wishes for the days when you believed what was printed or what Murrow or Cronkite told you and then forgot about it. I like the fact that it allows near-instant response to our world and that it is relatively democratic.
But I can't help but sometimes wish that we could all root for Superman and the endangered child and breathe a sigh of relief when he is rescued.
I know, I know. A majestic, beautiful, and intelligent creature was destroyed, quite possibly because a mother didn't keep a close enough eye on her kid.
Yet the truth is, almost none of us gave a shit that the western lowland gorilla is endangered prior to this event. Most of us won't give a shit after it's all over. We don't care that they are routinely killed by poachers for bush meat. We don't care about their habitat or the things that we may all be doing that could potentially lessen their numbers.
Because we like clean narratives. We like a villain. And we like it when the villain isn't us.
It makes us feel so morally superior, too, doesn't it? We get to pretend that we simultaneously care a lot about our fellow primates (we don't, as a rule) and that we care more about the welfare of a child than his mother does (you're fucking kidding me, right?).
The thing I have noticed most in the responses among friends is how the most censorious and virulent responses have come from those who have no children. "Is it so difficult to keep an eye on your child?!" "If you can't take care of them, then you shouldn't have them!" Et cetera. Ok, friend. I mean, last week you were posting about how you had only eaten Fruity Pebbles and beer for three days because you couldn't find the will to make it to the grocery store, but if you think you're an expert on caring for other people, who am I to disagree?
Here's the deal: children are unwieldy. They are humans. They do unpredictable things. They have an independent will and at times will even plot to thwart their parents' best efforts at supervision. I mean, I'm sure you never did that as a child, but many do.
If you have more than one of them, they get more unwieldy. You can find yourself distracted taking care of one only to find that another one has slipped your grasp. Older ones put younger ones up to dares. Younger ones are disbelieving of the dangers of which they are warned.
I can think of several examples in my own parenting, but the one that comes to mind was a couple years ago when the Goddess left me alone with the Monkey while she took the older kids out for a few hours. I fed him, bathed him, and played with him, then I let him crawl around while I sat on the couch and put on a movie. I was exhausted. I had a full day at work and I wanted to veg out for a bit.
I put up a safety gate going into the kitchen, because I didn't want him to get into anything. I put on the movie. The Monkey was playing around my feet and heard him go around the corner of the couch to an open area in the room, behind the sitting area. I did a quick mental check to make sure there was nothing for him to get into.
After a few minutes, I noticed he was being awfully quiet. I turned around. He was nowhere in sight. Panic shot through me.
I looked all over the room. Nothing. I looked under furniture. I called his name.
Then I heard him.
He was upstairs.
See, here's the thing: he had never climbed a single stair. I hadn't even considered putting a gate up at the foot of them. Yet in the space of about three minutes he had gone up a staircase of about twenty steps.
If you've read any of my blog, you will know my many parenting failures. We've had babies fall and hit their heads when they were left to be watched with siblings because mom had to pee. Hell, I had two babies playing with push pins last week when I turned my back for a few minutes. The Monkey was able to open a drawer that was heretofore too heavy for him and gave a handful to the Ape. We try to baby-proof everything, but it is nearly impossible, especially since the seven-year-old or eleven-year-old will leave things laying around. Yesterday, the Monkey pinched the Ape, apropos to nothing.
That's the other thing, too. Watching one child is one task. Add another child and the difficulty doesn't just double. It increases exponentially.
I've heard stories from friends over the years that make your skin crawl as a parent. There was the pastor who enjoyed tossing his son on the couch and missed, breaking his arm. Then there was a music teacher I visited once who lost his newborn in the house because he was half delirious from sleep deprivation. There's the mom who dropped her month-old child because she tripped over a vacuum cleaner her toddler had overturned. My cousin ate a bottle of children's Tylenol when he was about three while my aunt was in the same room, unaware of what he had. I was hit by my twin sister with a 2x4 when I was about a year old and then took a tumble down some stairs on the same day.
We would like to pretend that the world is safer than it is. We would like to pretend that we are better parents than we are. We want to believe a simple narrative where bad people do bad things and that's all that's wrong with the world.
I'm not saying the mom doesn't shoulder some blame here, maybe even the lion's share. I'm not even saying she's a great parent. I don't know anything about her, apart from what's been reported in the media. What I do know is that she was taking her kids to the zoo, ostensibly not to feed them to the lions. Shitty parents don't typically plan trips to the zoo.
There's the other side to this, too, which is that if we accept the simple narrative, we do not have to worry about a complex problem.
We can demonize one mother, and yet be unwilling to have a conversation about the hundreds of accidental childhood deaths that have been caused by firearms in this country. (That is such a common occurrence that it doesn't even make national news. I can't ever recall seeing one of those parents decried in social media.) For that matter, thousands of western lowland gorillas have perished because of the behaviors of humans. There is little fury around this issue and I imagine the vocal social media vigilantes who seek justice for Harambe will find another source of outrage once this story has faded. (Cecil the Lion, anyone?)
Real problems tend toward complexity and real solutions are difficult. If we want to make the world better for children like mine, like yours, like the four-year-old who fell into the gorilla pit — and for the children of Harambe — then we need less moral indignation at mothers and more hard thinking from all of us.
perfect.
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