LordEden

Here is the scene I watched the other day on a drive through my town. I was on a 5 lane road that leads to downtown and to the interstate. It's a 45 mph road and can be heavy on the traffic at times. On the right side of the road, walking along the sidewalk, was a group of kids (male & female) aged 9-13ish. They were joking and rough-housing on the side of the road. One of the boys jumped out in the street and did some kind of dance, pointing at another kid. A big truck (Ford 350 kind of big) was coming down the road on the right-hand lane but he slowed down when the kid jumped in the street. Right as he was passing the group a girl jumped out in the street to get away from another girl chasing her. The truck stops dead and the little girl throws her hands up in that "What are you going to do about it" childish pose. I have no idea if the driver in the truck said anything but he drove off a second later. As I passed them, they continued to mess around and push each other out into the street.

Here's what I was thinking, these kids were doing stupid things and could have gotten hurt or killed. Children dying is always news worthy articles for the local nightly news. It would make the 5 o'clock news and most likely have a reporter on the scene broadcasting. Maybe a parent would step on and say how much the child was loved/cared for/treasured blah blah blah. Either the on scene reporter or the anchorperson would say something like "... tragic accident involving a child".

That got me wondering, what was tragic about this? I know the death of a child is nothing to brush off, but how is an accident? A tragic accident is when a person loses control of a car and hits a child walking along the side of a road. Or a drunk driver killing someone who was doing nothing wrong but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. These kids had no care for the fact that they were doing something extremely dangerous, they were even laughing about it. They knew the drivers had to stop and would because they were kids. That doesn't seem tragic at all to me. When you do something stupid and irresponsible then get hurt by it, it's not tragic. If I were walking out in the middle of the street, taunting cars like the children were and I died, that wouldn't be tragic. That would be my own stupidity getting me hurt or killed.

My question is this; How many of these "tragic" events that we see on the news are not tragic at all? How many are people doing stupid things and getting hurt/killed? Should we really feel bad for them or should we write this off as morbid "survival of the fittest" kind of thing? I couldn't summon an ounce of remorse for a kid that was killed playing in street like the above story or for the parents who never taught the kids that playing the street is dangerous and stupid.

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Vice-President of the CinnamonGirl Fan Club - The Meat of the Zombiesquirrel and CinnamonGirl Sandwich