Just another day in the park.....not

So me and my wife decide to take our kids to the park today to let them have all manner of fun, frolick, and merriment. I made sure to pack their bikes into my wifes car (since there is no way they would fit in mine) and we head off. The park in question is only about a 5 minute drive from my home and it has an area where they can ride around and enjoy themselves as well as the standard swing sets, slides, ect. One thing I can say without question is that my daughter, for a three year old is fearless with her bike and has mad manuevering skills. My son is still getting used to his bike but I was proud of his persistence even when he had trouble. We stayed for about an hour and after that time we decided to leave. Here's the part that REALLY pissed me off.

As we are walking to the car we see a couple of kids wandering around a parked car kind of aimlessly, a mixture of concern and that "what do I do now" face that kids put up sometimes. So I immediately start to get worried and start looking around, telling my wife "Try to see if there is anyone around that should be watching over these kids." Mind you, the kids were wandering around near the car but also going through the parking area where any car with a less than careful driver could hit them and cause a terrible tragedy. As we get closer we see a child in the back of the car strapped to his car seat. While the car was in partial shade the area where the child was seated was getting a decent ray of sunshine breaking thru the canopy of the tree line and hitting him almost like a focused laser. You could tell he was in discomfort. Seeing that, my anger only grew but I kept my cool.

Inside the car was a man and a woman, apparently the parents of these children. They looked asleep but part of me feared they had had some kind of physical attack that had caused them to pass out. I guess my sense of logic and hope was trying to rationalize why they would allow there kids to be in such a precarious state. One of the kids, a young girl that could not be more than 5 years old comes up to me and says "I have to do #1" but not exactly in those words. Now, had I been a bad person with terrible intentions I could have easily walked away with the little girl while HER PARENTS SLEPT AWAY DURING THE ENTIRE EPISODE. Worst still was that the other child was even younger than the girl, perhaps no more than three years ol and wandering around farther from the car than her. Still keeping my cool I decided this was intolerable and I tapped on the car loud enough for the parents to hear me. They awoke from their slumber in that semi-dazed state that people have when they wake up unexpectedly. I told the woman "Ma'm your children were wandering around outside the car while you  were sleeping. I didn't want anything bad to happen to them so I thought I should wake you up. I hope you understand."

She looked around and said "Oh wow, I can't believe we fell asleep in the car this way" and I'm not even sure she thanked me for what I did (which is okay because my primary concern was the well being of the children and not her thanks.) Worst still, I told her that her child apparently wanted to go to the bathroom and as I was getting into my car and loading the stuff up I saw her and the guy she was with drive away without taking the child to the public bathroom in the park.

Being a parent is not easy. I love my kids and while no parent is perfect what I saw those people do today was deeply disturbing. I'd like to be surprised by what happened but then I read stories about parents leaving their kids in the back seats of their cars on very hot days and the kids dying from suffocation or heat stroke. I hear stories of parents leaving kids who are too young to be left alone in the house by themselves and then the often horrific consequences of doing so. Part of me wanted to rage against them, to scream "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING!!!" but I didn't think that anger like that would be constructive in any way.

Mistakes like those parents made are what causes kids to end up on the back of milk cartons, on missing persons posters, or worse still, a cold metal table in a morgue with a coroner or forensics person on hand to find the cause of death. We, as a race, and regardless of where we stand philosophically, should be less concerned with waging war against one another and instead wage a war against these kinds of careless behavior. We should stand against the apathy that causes a parent to fall asleep in there car with the windows down while one child is blistering in the back seat and another two wander around with no supervision. Who knows what would have happened if I had not stepped in. But you know what REALLY pisses me off...

I shouldn't have had to.

I'm no better than anyone but I refuse to stand by when I see things like this and do nothing, especially being a parent myself. It's this whole "it's none of my business" or "it's not my problem" attitude that festers way too often in our society and we need to do our part, even in the tiniest of ways, to stomp a mudhole in it and send it crawling back into the darkness.