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Musings. And a rant of sorts.
Jan. 24th, 2003 08:44 amWednesday morning, the news was talking about a body found on the ice of Lake Minnetonka. Thursday morning, the news was talking about two teenagers who had been driving on the lake Tuesday night, when their car went through the ice. According to the paper, the girl's parents tried to dissuade them but they said they knew what they were doing. The girl managed to get out of the water, and walked and crawled 200 of the 300 yards to a nearby house before she succumbed to the cold. They found the boy's body in the lake, but not in the car. They're still looking for the car.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/3609645.html
Sheesh. On a lake with a widely publicized mystery hole in the ice that the scientists have not yet found a reason for, they go driving. At night. In the dark. Yesterday's paper said the tire tracks suggested they might have been sliding. They tell us lake ice should be at least five inches thick before you go trying to drive a car on it. But it hasn't been cold enough long enough for the ice to be uniformly that thick. And then there's the matter of the mystery hole....
They were a good-looking couple. They were outgoing, popular, active. They had their lives ahead of them. They had, to paraphrase, potential. And now they're dead. All the potential in the world doesn't do you a damn bit of good when you're thawing on a slab in the city morgue, waiting for your parents to show up and ID you.
Water tends to draw people--we're fascinated by it. Inexorably, we're drawn to it. Last year (December), there was a local story about three kids who drowned while playing on the ice of the pond behind their house. Was there a fence keeping the children and the pond apart? No. Did the parents think that the pond might be one of those attractive but deadly things? Well, yes, they grudgingly admitted that they knew it was probably dangerous, yet there was no fence.
Modern humans seem to think that nature can't hurt them (with the possible exception of the few people who are fatally allergic to bee stings), which is how you get parents smearing jam on a child's face and pushing him out the door of the car so they can take a picture of the bear licking his face. And a star athlete dying of dehydration while trying to walk across a desert area without enough water. And people driving around on too-thin lake ice in the middle of the night.
When I was 17, my mother complained incessantly about the parents of some of my friends, because they apparently didn't watch us closely enough. I will grant that there were a couple of sets of parents who were really not paying very close attention to us, but I will also counter with the fact that my mother hovered. Nobody wanted to hang out at my house because we couldn't do anything without my mother breathing down our necks. Even just watching television. Two weeks before her death, fifteen years after it happened, she was *still* harping on one particular pair of parents not knowing what was going on in their house. [For the record, we were watching anime and consuming milkshakes made with rather a lot of sugar and extra caffeine.]
So, Mom, if you're paying attention at all-- Give it up. I have a wonderful partner with whom I will be celebrating 10 years of marriage. I have a good job. I have a nice house. I have nifty friends, many of which you would actually have liked. I do not have a drinking problem. I do not have a drug problem. I am not in jail. I did not have to have an abortion because the condom broke. I did not have to get married suddenly because I was pregnant. I did not go on a shooting rampage in the halls of my high school. I will concede I don't have children, but if I did, they would not be spastic inarticulate behavior problems.
And, most importantly, I am still alive.
Ok, rant over. On to the next topic.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/3609645.html
Sheesh. On a lake with a widely publicized mystery hole in the ice that the scientists have not yet found a reason for, they go driving. At night. In the dark. Yesterday's paper said the tire tracks suggested they might have been sliding. They tell us lake ice should be at least five inches thick before you go trying to drive a car on it. But it hasn't been cold enough long enough for the ice to be uniformly that thick. And then there's the matter of the mystery hole....
They were a good-looking couple. They were outgoing, popular, active. They had their lives ahead of them. They had, to paraphrase, potential. And now they're dead. All the potential in the world doesn't do you a damn bit of good when you're thawing on a slab in the city morgue, waiting for your parents to show up and ID you.
Water tends to draw people--we're fascinated by it. Inexorably, we're drawn to it. Last year (December), there was a local story about three kids who drowned while playing on the ice of the pond behind their house. Was there a fence keeping the children and the pond apart? No. Did the parents think that the pond might be one of those attractive but deadly things? Well, yes, they grudgingly admitted that they knew it was probably dangerous, yet there was no fence.
Modern humans seem to think that nature can't hurt them (with the possible exception of the few people who are fatally allergic to bee stings), which is how you get parents smearing jam on a child's face and pushing him out the door of the car so they can take a picture of the bear licking his face. And a star athlete dying of dehydration while trying to walk across a desert area without enough water. And people driving around on too-thin lake ice in the middle of the night.
When I was 17, my mother complained incessantly about the parents of some of my friends, because they apparently didn't watch us closely enough. I will grant that there were a couple of sets of parents who were really not paying very close attention to us, but I will also counter with the fact that my mother hovered. Nobody wanted to hang out at my house because we couldn't do anything without my mother breathing down our necks. Even just watching television. Two weeks before her death, fifteen years after it happened, she was *still* harping on one particular pair of parents not knowing what was going on in their house. [For the record, we were watching anime and consuming milkshakes made with rather a lot of sugar and extra caffeine.]
So, Mom, if you're paying attention at all-- Give it up. I have a wonderful partner with whom I will be celebrating 10 years of marriage. I have a good job. I have a nice house. I have nifty friends, many of which you would actually have liked. I do not have a drinking problem. I do not have a drug problem. I am not in jail. I did not have to have an abortion because the condom broke. I did not have to get married suddenly because I was pregnant. I did not go on a shooting rampage in the halls of my high school. I will concede I don't have children, but if I did, they would not be spastic inarticulate behavior problems.
And, most importantly, I am still alive.
Ok, rant over. On to the next topic.
