Why children deserve better parents
My very good friend The Merchant of Menace posted a emarkably perspicacious piece on the abduction of the British toddler Madeleine McCann in Portugal - http://tinyurl.com/35byx8 - wherein he lays culpability squarely on the heads of her professional, affluent parents. He expects to draw some flak for this and I can see why but I am behind him 100 percent on this.
Of course he will draw flak. In this world that seeks to shift blame anywhere but on the culprit. Where everything is somebody else's fault. Of course he will draw flak. In a world where childrens' needs and desires are supposed to be paramount but where abandonment of children is both commonplace and routine. Abandon the kids to the televison. Abandon the kids to computer games and internet sites. Abandon the kids to a child minder. Anything but take responsibilty.
If children are so precious why do westerners regularly, as a matter of course, refuse to take responsibilty for anything other than their material well-being? As if that was all that really mattered. Why do western governments, and here I'm thinking particularly of the UK government, encourage and even coerce parents to abandon their children - actively penalising them if they refuse to go out to work and abandon their children?
We have achieved a breathtaking, a vertiginous, zenith of hypocrisy with respect (sic) to our children. Publicly, children are sacrosanct. Their interests override all others. Privately, they are little more than life-style accessories to be off loaded when they inconvenience our lives. Which seems more and more to mean most of the time. Why else would it be the case, as Wikipedia states - "According to a recent UNICEF report on child well-being [2] the United States and the United Kingdom ranked lowest among rich nations with respect to the well being of their children" - ?
The British press has already begun to shift the blame for this incident squarely onto the Portugese police investigation with never a mention of the appalling act of abandonment that led to it. Breathtaking hypocrisy. Shame on them and on the parents. And on all who try to absolve the parents from their culpability.
I hope only that this child can be found and that when found she will be placed in the care of someone who actually cares for her. And that she can somehow recver from this trauma. I doubt it though.
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Some of the 'chattering classes' over here have been excusing the McCanns because it was not reasonable to foresee that a predatory paedophile would abduct their little girl whilst they were out carousing with friends.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough, but that's not the real issue here.
Whether the child was abducted by a predatory paedophile, or simply by some other type of unbalanced personality is irrelevant to the primary issue: the McCanns wilfully left their children unattended in order to pursue their own selfish pleasure, knowing full-well that in their absence any or all of their children could have woken up and undergone what appeared to them to be a lifetime of horrific abandonment until their parents next deigned to visit them.
It is the McCanns who must accept the primary responsibility for what happened to their poor little daughter, and any and all attempts to place the primary blame elsewhere for what has befallen Madeleine is both wrong and misplaced.
Frankly, I think that the McCanns are contemptible, and I hope that they are devoured by guilt and remorse for their selfish, wicked actions.