The Dim Nightlight of Blame

When I was in the second or third grade, whichever teacher taught us about the "greater than" and "less than" symbols suggested than we think of them as little alligators who always want to eat the larger number. 14
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The alligator thing is always there in the back of my mind, but it doesn't typically get in the way of anything. Last week, however, when I woke up and sleepily rolled over to my phone to see what was up in the world, the first thing that I saw was a comment about the gorilla shooting which included this phrase "human child> gorilla." My first thought: "Why didn't anyone shoot the alligator?"

It took me a minute.

The uniting opinion among people defending the actions of the zoo and those who decry them is that the mother of the kid is to blame. By default. The ape was just being an ape the kid was being a kid, the zoo was being a zoo. Therefore, it is the finding of this self-appointed committee of people who may or may not gathered and reviewed the facts while midway through the act of pooping, the mom, since blame needs to fall on someone, is the villain. We may now adjourn to breakfast.

Only... is she? If you gathered data about every group that visits a zoo, you'd find a certain percentage of them to be comprised of exactly this ratio of children and adults. And yet, very rarely does it end up with a child being dragged around by a gorilla. Not never, but rarely. Similarly, I think a lot of kids say out loud that they'd like to climb in there with the animals without taking any steps to make it happen.  It's as if expecting your child not to wind up mano-a-monko with a silverback is actually pretty reasonable.

You know what? The very fact that she was willing to take a large group of kids to a zoo in the first place is kind of commendable. That's not my first choice activity for a group. The zoo never smells good, it's always fifteen degrees hotter there and the novelty of seeing a variety of animals fades quickly -- like the flavor on your frozen tongue after your third bite of ice cream. No adult has taken kids to the zoo because that adult thought the experience was going to be fun for the adult. So, bless her distracted, inattentive heart.  She gave it a shot.

The reason that this has stuck with me five days past the point at which everyone else is sick to death from hearing about it (aside from the slowness it takes me to form opinions) is that I saw this other thing which I think is more than slightly related.

Someone posted a suggestion somewhere that people, especially now that the weather is warming up, should leave their cell phone in the backseat next to their baby so they don't forget that the baby is in the car, because... you know, that happens.

That suggestion was met with a lot of hostility, because it can be interpreted as assuming a deeply personal and interconnected relationship with an electronic object and a sort of casual easy-come easy-go relationship with a small, helpless human being in footy pajamas.  But we all know, to persist as a society, it must be true that a little alligator would rather eat a human child than a cell phone.

The critics of this idea, to put it as kindly as I can, are simpletons. If you had some sort of important medical form that you had to remember to mail to your child's pediatrician in the morning, you'd put it with your keys. No one would criticize you for valuing your love of your car over your child's well-being. On that scale, I think we can all recognize the act of associating the keys and the medical form as a manifestation of what most of our life really is: tricking the weird, gooey organ in our heads into actually doing the things that we really need it to do.

The cognitive deficit that lets you leave a stack of papers on the roof and then drive off like a stupid Office Max comet is the same one that sometimes results incomprehensible tragedy.  If you're capable of one of these things, you're capable of the other.

I have, it terrifies me to recall, suggested out loud to my wife that since our new infant son was spitting out his pacifier and waking up every three minutes, that maybe we secure it with a Donald Duck Band-Aid. And I'd like to qualify that by saying I'd had, like, thirty-five minutes of sleep that week, but honestly the only reason I now know that to be a terrible idea is that a couple years later I read of a child who died as a result of one of his parents doing that exact thing.

I hasten to point out that my wife instantly recognized that idea as dangerous and that her rejection of it was swift and indelicate.


It's damaging to our sense of free will, which is a concept to which humanity is clinging with the reckless optimism of a passenger lashing himself to the Titanic's pool table, but we are relying on organic and self-governing tools, exempt from quality control and regulation, and at first glance have every appearance of being a large and slimy piece of cauliflower, to navigate a minefield of a universe which is indifferent at best. Our actions exist at cross-purposes with our intentions more frequently than any of us would allow in a purposeful beta release.

If the stupidest thing you've ever done didn't end in the death of a higher primate, don't be glib. The assumed truth that an alligator would rather eat a human child than a gorilla won't be a consolation when the persistent clockwork of your own worst moment clicks into its inevitable position.