Public Comment

My father speaks of his undergraduate days at Dartmouth. It seems that every year the freshmen were called together and advised not to climb Mt. Washington in the winter. New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington is billed as having the worst weather on the planet and this is so. It is a dangerous place, bleak and windblown, with fierce and dramatic weather changes caused by a strange downdraft of the jet stream exactly at that spot. “And every year some damned fool would climb it and die,” he says. 

  “Some damned fool” is a favorite Vermont expression. It most likely describes a person who does something so clearly idiotic—read this as “a city person”—that anyone with two I.Q. points to rub together would know better than to do it. This can be anything from stranding yourself by driving through a rain-swollen street of unknown depth—the wife asked if the windows were closed—to repairing a chandelier without killing the electricity. Small-town newspapers are full of accident reports outlining who is in the hospital for what infraction of human intelligence, all told in Sgt. Friday’s just-the-facts style while the reader relays it to another, saying, “Get this, Maude, some damned fool…” 

  Today’s newspaper tells two stories that attract attention. The first is the desperate search for the three Mt. Hood climbers, one of whose body has already been found. Circumstances of his death reveal he took a long, slow fall, surviving it with minor injuries to walk or crawl several hundred yards before freezing to death. The whereabouts of his two companions is unknown. They are likely dead as well. 

  Rangers on the mountain have debated requiring climbers to wear locators but hadn’t made it official, so these three climbers weren’t wearing them, although they had a cell phone that was activated once. The larger question, and I’m sorry to point this out, was what were they thinking? They climbed a mountain while inadequately provisioned wearing no locators in questionable weather in the winter. What did they think was going to happen? A huge mountain rescue effort has been mobilized on their behalf, which endangers other people’s loved ones in very bad weather to look for three people who should have known better. 

  The other case in the news is that of the three hikers in Iraq who were arrested for crossing the Iranian border. The distraught mother of one of them said, “But they’re just kids on a hiking trip!” Two of them are 27 and one is 31. Kids they are not. Hiking in a war zone? Folly. 

  Now they are facing a trial as spies and I’m sure they are sitting in jail wondering, “What did we do wrong except make a little geographical mistake?” I would argue that they knew exactly what they were doing because there isn’t a 30 year-old alive today that doesn’t own a GPS gizmo. These three were tempting fate and they got caught. 

  A third, less recent, example now comes to mind: the two female American journalists captured by the North Koreans in June and sentenced to twelve years hard labor for crossing into North Korean territory. No one would argue that the punishment fits the crime, but this turned into an international incident because two young women, 31 and 32, deliberately crossed a forbidden border in search of a story and got caught. Again I ask, what were they thinking? It took the intervention of a former president to get them released. One must suppose that the hikers in Iran hope for that same or similar intervention. This is becoming tiresomely predictable. Do something stupid and wait for someone to bail you out. 

  There is such a thing as assumption of risk. Or there would be, if middle-class parents would stop bending over backwards to protect children from learning a few of life’s important lessons. This habit of cosseting children and keeping them safe from everything has reached an extreme. Problems with a teacher? Blame the teacher. Your kid isn’t a star athlete? Yell at the coach. Parents who prevent children and young adults from suffering the consequences of their actions do them no favors. Teachers call them helicopter parents; they’re always hovering, ready to provide a real or psychological pillow lest the child be hurt. 

  My husband was a helicopter parent. As a newly adoptive father his head was full of well-intentioned don’ts. That my son had managed to make it through eleven years of life until the adoption had not occurred to him. I hadn’t understood my own child-rearing contract with my son until I overheard the two of them discussing my husband’s need to smother. “You don’t understand,” said my child. “My mom has raised me to try anything unless she thinks it will kill me. Then she’ll tell me no.” 

  I have news for parents who are protecting their children from everything, whether it’s eating food dropped on the floor or just messing around with tools in the garage: getting hurt is part of the job of growing up. It’s the little injuries that teach us to avoid the big ones. It’s the experience of failure that teaches us to sort out wise from unwise actions. If you are always and forever cushioned and praised you will never learn to discriminate among the temptations and snares along the path. You will plunge headlong into the first damned fool thing that strikes your fancy because you have no experience in distinguishing what is smart from what is stupid and dangerous behavior. Without pain you have no blueprint for decision-making and have developed no voice that says, “Don’t do this.” 

  All of the young people in the three examples I have cited were between the ages of 21 and 32. One is dead. Two others are most probably dead. Parents are grieving. Two are free by the grace of God and Bill Clinton. Three are rotting in an Iranian prison. They should have known better. Why didn’t they? 

Penelope H. Bevan is an Oakland resident.