News Poem in Public Square - Lifeguards of morality
Who can save when morality threatens to drown us?
Or if they’re lucky we just ruin their lives, make them rue every morning they awake A kid waiting outside a school for a parent who is not coming, will never come again. A kid going to bed hungry because SNAP was cut, or new burdensome requirements kicked their family off the rolls A kid who isn’t allowed to read a book because it represents them, and that makes the white kids uncomfortable A kid who is now one of the largest population of amputees ever A kid who hasn’t quite starved, yet
Even when kids, or adults, drowning at the beach aren’t in the headlines, I’ve never understood why folks would let their kids swim in the ocean without lifeguards.1 Often parents do this while lifeguards are on duty, but they’re just outside the flags designating the swimming area. I guess it’s just another egotistical thing, my kids deserve their own space, but the guards will still save them, even though we’re breaking the rules. But perhaps the worst version of this is the folks doing this after the guards have left for the day, or in the stretches of beach where no one else is around. Looming darkness the only way to make this activity less safe.
For some reason the parents are almost never in the water with the kids, which I could somewhat justify as you’d at least have a sense of the pull and conditions. A chance to prevent a tragedy because you’re very unlikely to rescue someone from the ocean, even if you were a lifeguard 20 years and 30 pounds ago.
In the last 10 years, they’re now often on their phone, but even before that, they were chatting with someone, or playing with the dog, half paying attention at best. Maybe I’ve just had more “oh shit” moments in the ocean than others have. But it always feels like this is more letting your kids rock climb without ropes, than it is letting your kid climb a tree in terms of the level of worry.
People “raised in the ocean” or “part fish” have drowned in the ocean. Lifeguards have gotten pulled so far out trying to rescue folks that boats or jet skis have been necessary to rescue them and bring them back to shore. But this parent is so confident they’re playing Snake on their phone while their kid turns their back on the waves.
Passing another parent doing this recently started this poem.
In searching for a photo to go along with the poem, this one wasn’t quite right, but was a really amazing picture that folks should see:
Obviously huge first world, privilege, etc. bias/lens here. Plenty of folks have no guarded beach option to take their kids to. Not judging those parents who are doing the best they can and don’t have the guardrails or safety nets I have access to, and are probably far better parents than most of us in the parts of the world I’m observing day-to-day. ↩
Newsletter image by Hannes Wolf on Unsplash