Good People, Bad Things

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Yesterday afternoon there were several police cars and emergency vehicles practically blocking the place. People were milling around talking and watching and waiting.

A five year old boy was found dead at the bottom of our complexes hot tub. There were lots of people swimmming in the pool adjacent to it. Attempts by several residents failed to recuscitate him and he was pronounced dead 45 minutes later at the hospital just a couple of minutes away.

The morning newspaper reports that there is a criminal investigation in progress.

My sense is that this investigation will focus on parental neglect as the mother was heard asking if anyone had seen her child and she was at the pool with him. We must, it seems, have someone to blame when such things happen.

My heart goes out to this family. Not only have they suffered the loss of a child, but now will suffer an investigation, public opinion, and possible criminal prosecution.

On one hand, this was a senseless and preventable death. Hot tubs are dangerous as the shift blood pressure and people can suffer injury in them as a result. Young children should not be allowed to "play" in them, and certainly not without close and immediate supervision.

On the other hand, holding a parent responsible for not watching a child every moment, or an apartment complex responsible for not having fences and signs and all manner of safeguards, is also a dangerous matter. Both create situations where someone must be held responsible always. Our legal system is flooded with such actions, both civil and criminal.

Left out of the equation often is the indivdual within situation, as well as a good and balanced sense of what the limitations are for us all in protecting each other from ourselves. Children are by their very nature curious and playful. They do not understand risk and have limited capacities for evaluating dangers. Many adults suffer the same or similar limitations. We do things without reading the labels, climb ladders with tons of stuff attached to out bodies, act as if we were flying squirrels and die, then our families sue. There should have been a warning about carrying two six packs, a hammer, a box of nails, a four 2x4s up an unopened step ladder braced against the wall of a house.

As faith based people, inclined toward a moral and spiritual path in life, we must focus our compassion on all concerned. Blame can be, but is not always, compassionate, although action to prevent further harm is. Shoulds and oughts are fine for the sake of discovering ways to prevent another injury, but do no real good in terms of correcting what has already happened. Judgement will not help us here. Good sense and an open heart will.

Our belief is, as insane as it is, that we should somehow be able to prevent every mis-step imaginable and if we don't then somehow we are remiss to the point of criminal culpability. When bad things happen to good people, and we are all good people, we must embrace each other with loving kindness and work hard at letting the judgements go.

Be well.