It's nearly as awful as the Aussie model/triathlete who was out jogging with her baby on a hill above the Torrens river in Adelaide. She stopped to answer her phone and turned away to write a number on her thigh. When she turned back, the baby was gone. Being a celebrity-type, her first thought was to run around screaming "My baby's been stolen." It was a while before anyone bothered to look down the hill and see the pram floating in the water. The baby died later in hospital.
[story]
Yeti (my husband-like person) claims that my generation has a habit of dissembling. It's never our fault, always someone else's. Being considerably older, he can get away with making such sweeping generalisations (he makes different and equally cogent criticisms of his own generation, but that's another story) . I guess he's not the only one who has noticed this trend, as I was amused to read this in the Driver's Handbook (while studying for my final driver's licence test):
And when people make insurance claims after crashes, they generally avoid taking the blame. The experts call this ‘external attribution’ – where you attribute blame or the reason that things happen to things outside of yourself. As you might have guessed, ‘internal attribution’ is when you assign blame or the reason that things happen to yourself. The healthiest situation is where you can recognise the things that are due to you and what you do and the things that aren’t. Research suggests that people who can honestly recognise what is their fault and what is others’ are safer drivers.
It’s tough to accept that some things are down to you.
Tough is not the word, when you think of that little boy's mother. I can't help wondering - did she see what really happened and then automatically invent a way for it not to be her fault, or was she really that clueless? Either way it's going to be bloody difficult to live with...
Leonardo's favourite stuffed toy lion sat atop his white coffin, next to a bunch of white roses, while songs played at the service included The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
But the story which prompted me to write tonight involves a different kind of tragic stupidy, and it would be very hard to attribute blame to the ones who will suffer as a result.
Apparently a mother with three children died from water intoxication after trying to see how much she could drink without peeing. The reason? She was participating in a radio contest to win a Nintendo Wii.[story]
Who is to blame for that senseless waste of human life? And how will those three kids deal with a lifetime of 'internal attribution' - believing that it was their fault. After all, she was doing it for them... wasn't she?
:(
2 comments:
There seems to be alot of stupidity around lately - It's unbelievable some of the stories you hear - you do tend to wonder if the press is representing it in a certain way or whether that much stupidity really exists
Hello! We arrived in Adelaide the week that pram in the river story was plastered everywhere in papers. A horrible reminder of how things can go wrong when you have a little one dependent on you... I'm being pretty diligent with my standing away from balcony edges and putting the pram brakes on. Bad enough to lose a child, 1x10 to the zillionth times worse if it's your stupidity that causes it!!
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