I don’t have a problem with the sailing attempt — I think that today’s children are far too coddled and infantilized (all the way to age 26, thanks to ObamaCare). I don’t see anything particularly magic about eighteen, either. Different people mature at different rates. There are many people who would never be able to do this at any age (most people, I’d say). What I’m looking forward to is the youngest (or even first) person to sail around the moon.
52 thoughts on “Negligent Parents?”
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This kid probably communicates more with her parents than most teenagers do. Provided she’s got all the safety and location equipment she needs, I dont see any negligence.
Negligence implies neglect. While the parents have a “duty of care” for their dependent child, the teenage years definitely establish a broad grey area for where a parents duty of care changes from sheltering them from risky behaviors or activities, to encouraging them to take risks in order to establish themselves in the world.
A 16 year old girl isn’t a five year old child who shouldn’t be swinging from a tree. She’s old enough to reach the age of consent in most jurisdictions, so legally she is cognisant of the risks she is undertaking, and capable of exercising her consent independently of her parents.
In prior ages this threshold began at age 13. The modern baby boomer umbilicalist behavior of perpetuating the infantilization of their children as a form of transference in avoiding one’s own impending mortality is a neurosis that is better left behind in the dustbin of the 20th century.
I have no issue with letting a teen circumnavigate per se, BUT… I have a major issue with having the teen do so in a boat that has been extensively refitted and modified, without any form of shakedown cruise whatsoever. (that happened here, which is why she had to pull into Ensenada, Mexico).
I also have major issues with a small racing yacht being bellow 40s in the southern ocean in mid-June! There was no good reason for that; she could have been routed further north (as far as 30s) and still had westerlies, and she could have also waited a couple of months for a more viable seasonal weather window for that crossing.
So, while I think letting experienced teen sailors attempt circumnavigations is fine in itself, I have major qualms about some of the things done in this particular instance.
Ok, so who planned the route? If she planned the route, its her own negligence.
And yes, I’ve sailed under conditions less severe than those described (20-25 ft waves) and been scared shitless as an adult, tho the boat I was in at the time (an 18 foot Donzi speed boat) really wasn’t appropriate for the conditions. So I’ve resembled that sort of stupidity in the past.
I dont know what 40 S lat is like, but I’ve sailed above 40 N lat in November and I wouldn’t mind sailing at that lat in a 40 foot sailboat with a closed cabin. It’s certainly doable. I think choosing a more polar latitude to sail in order to catch faster winds is a tradeoff on risk. If you sail closer to the equator, you may have less rough seas and weather ON AVERAGE, but you will spend a lot more time asea going the same distance and run an equal or greater total risk.
I don’t know much about sailing, but I think it’s inspirational to see a teenager who is so mature, skillful and level-headed. As a parent, though, I would never have had the guts to let my child do something that dangerous – even if she were capable.
I doubt very much I’d allow my kid to do it. I would consider it somewhat irresponsible behaviour in an adult, unless he’s got no dependents. It’d be one thing if this were true pioneering, or even just a rather long retreat to figure yourself out. But it is openly a publicity stunt — to become the youngest to do it — and I find that kind of motivation unfortunate.
Further, while I might trust a 16-year-old to sail the boat, I’m not sure I would trust her to judge whether the risk of a circumnavigation is worth the reward of the publicity. My experience is that it is in exactly this area — weighing the value of fame and social admiration — that the judgment of teenagers goes askew. Indeed, it tends to be what makes them teenagers: they’ll do absurd things to win social admiration.
Sure, and thats what freedom is about, the right to make your own mistakes, and pay for them. I’d say this kid is getting off easy, with a busted mast, but I’d not begrudge her the right to have that experience. Our culture is dying because too many people think protecting us from the consequences of our own mistakes is the main point of government.
My wife and I were talking about this last night while the word was she was still missing, and I told her I thought this cruise was the girl’s parents’ version of telling her to go play in traffic.
I got such a dirty look.
Life is about risk. Freedom wins, let her go, prepare her council her support her, but let her go. Its cool that this spirit is not yet 100% dead in society.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that, ak. I think it’s more like she comes home from school and tells you she and her boyfriend are going to get matching tattoos on their faces, each with the other’s initials in a heart or something.
Sure, freedom is great stuff, and if she was an adult about all you’d do would roll your eyes and sigh. But the only reason parents keep some control of what their teenagers do is to have the power to compensate for some of the irrational weight they put on peer acceptance and approval, and their tendency to overlook long-term consequences. And it is exactly in questions like this — What price glory? — that the teenage mind tends to make its worst mistakes.
Let me give a more concrete example. I do a lot of hiking up tallish (10,000′ plus) mountains, and as anyone knows one problem with that is that you do it in the summer, and in the summer in the mountains you get thunderstorms, and thunderstorms on a mountain are unusually unpredictable and dangerous.
Once upon a time I was taking a new girlfriend up a mountain hike. We’d packed tents and stuff in, were planning to spend the night. Very romantic, yes. But in the first hour of the ascent, the skies opened wide and the rain came down down down. We kept on for a while, but then came some careful thought. It was clearly not going to stop real soon. Now what? Getting wet isn’t that bad, and besides we had gear. But have I mentioned how thunderstorms in mountains are dangerous?
So, very reluctantly, I decided we needed to turn around. Just quit. Trudge down, put everything back in the car, and go home, admitting total defeat. I felt like a God-damned pussy, you may be sure, although the wisdom of being in my 30s told me it was the right decision. And I felt much better, in a sense, when the next day I read that 3 people had been killed in flash floods on that very same mountain the very same day.
Now imagine I’d been only 20 instead of 35, but still with the new girl to impress and show a good time. Or worse, imagine I was 16. Would I make the right decision? With the hormones bubbling through my brain? I don’t think so. There’s the problem.
Well, this Australian is happy that our Maritime Search and Rescue got a workout for real and actually found her. Chalk it up to training. No problems with her trying. We just had a 15 year old girl sail around the world solo.
Carl,
Your argument is 100% correct, but I’d still let her go.
Teaching people to be a little unreasonable is a good thing
IMHO đ
It was a stunt without a purpose.
I can see risk if there is some real and not imagined reward.
I could see her being on a crew doing this but not solo.
I have no issues with the parents. I’m proud she pursued her dream, and sorry she won’t succeed in it.
I’m sure she will be back, she’s gotten some publicity from the rescue and big corporate sponsors are surely not far behind to fund her next go.
Bingo. I don’t think she had the emotional maturity to consider all aspects of the risks she undertook. I’ll bet that one way or another she WAS influenced by her parents to do this, to break a record rather than for the personal challenge and growth, else why not wait a few months for better weather? She also might have been irrationally motivated, internally or externally, to ‘uphold the family tradition’ — didn’t her brother sail around the world solo too?
As a more-or-less libertarian sort, I’m in favor of letting people go to hell in their own ways, including using drugs. But I’d sure have qualms about parents who gave their sixteen-year-old daughter heroin.
So how much did the search-and-rescue mission cost, and who’s going to pay for it?
One note–didn’t her older brother already do this?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ”
Or – to summarize – you’re all a bunch of pussies.
Murgatroyd, I’m probably paying for my part of the search and rescue as I’m an Australian taxpayer. I’m chalking it up to training. Your SAR organization can do all the exercises it likes. Only when all the people involved know it is for real do you find out how good they are. I’m happy they chartered a Qantas aircraft, launched and found her. Also this gives me reassurance about the 406MHz GPS beacons my wife and I wear when flying.
Her brother did it when he was the same age she is now. So was that okay? I just wonder if we’d be having this conversation if the kid in question was a boy.
As for this being nothing but typical teen status-seeking… Well, I didn’t realize there was a big teen fad for sailing around the world. Someone like this teenager is more likely to be something of an outcast. “All she wants to do is be on her stupid boat. She doesn’t care about clothes or boys or anything! If I had a boat like that I’d be partying on it all the time but instead she keeps talking about sailing around the world. Ew! What if she drowns in the middle of nowhere?” Also she’s comfortable being by herself — that’s very unnatural for most teenagers, or so I was told when I was a teen.
I was never into impressing my peers when I was a teenager. I knew what most of them were into (parties, disco, makeup and clothes, football). Nothing I liked to do was considered impressive (reading, writing, reading).
I agree with some earlier commenters that it’s good to see a young person who is poised, self-confident, ambitious, and fearless. Our society is dying from the plague of lazy, spoiled, and entitled people (of all ages).
I’m all for it if it was her own idea and she had backing from her family. I would be a little less enthusiastic if it turns out that her parents pushed her to devoting her life to achieving their dreams, as often happens with child athletes.
A commenter on another blog suggested that it would probably be a good idea if adventurers like this were required to post a bond beforehand, to cover the cost of any rescue mission that may become necessary. That makes sense to me. That was never an issue for explorers and adventurers in the past, because no rescue infrastructure existed.
“I just wonder if weâd be having this conversation if the kid in question was a boy”
I would, it is an arbitrary stunt with no true purpose.
If she was trying to be the first person ever to circumnavigate the globe in a boat, I could see it, but she was simply trying to be younger than the last person by a few months.
In fact, she left when she did because she would have been too old if she had waited for better conditions in the southern indian ocean.
She took an unnecessary risk for an arbitrary number.
More power to her. When I was a senior in high school, I wanted to make my senior project a repeat of Colin Fletcher’s solo hike from one end of Grand Canyon National Park to the other (memorialized in the book “The Man Who Walked Through Time”). I corresponded with him extensively, and had it pretty well doped out…but was not allowed to do it despite being in top physical condition, and an experienced backpacker.
Today you CAN’T do it. The enviros have made certain of that, with annual limits on the time any one person can spend in a National Park. The irony is that it would be far safer today, with GPS and cell phones…
Some people sound very much like the lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” song, “Mother”
Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
Mother do you think they’ll like this song?
Mother do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
Mother should I build the wall?
Mother should I run for president?
Mother should I trust the government?
Mother will they put me in the firing line?
Mother am I really dying?
Hush now baby, baby, dont you cry.
Mother’s gonna make all your nightmares come true.
Mother’s gonna put all her fears into you.
Mother’s gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She wont let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mama will keep baby cozy and warm.
Ooooh baby ooooh baby oooooh baby,
Of course mama’ll help to build the wall.
Mother do you think she’s good enough — to me?
Mother do you think she’s dangerous — to me?
Mother will she tear your little boy apart?
Mother will she break my heart?
Hush now baby, baby dont you cry.
Mama’s gonna check out all your girlfriends for you.
Mama wont let anyone dirty get through.
Mama’s gonna wait up until you get in.
Mama will always find out where you’ve been.
Mama’s gonna keep baby healthy and clean.
Ooooh baby oooh baby oooh baby,
You’ll always be baby to me.
Mother, did it need to be so high?
“it is an arbitrary stunt with no true purpose.”
I guess “self-discovery” means nothing to you. Also, I guess you know all!
You know, there is nothing that used to irritate me more (and I’m being nice — actually it drove me into a blinding rage and still does and only my extremely good self-control kept me from breaking stuff then and now) to be told, as a teenager — or at any age! — that something you did that other people don’t understand or aren’t into was “just to impress other people.” Yeah, I read all those books just to impress other people — it wasn’t like I really wanted to read them anyway. Yeah, I got all those good grades just to impress other people — it wasn’t like I enjoyed the subject and thus actually decided to learn it. Yeah, I spend every single waking moment trying to impress other people. Right. I’ve had to deal with cynics like you trying to bring me down all my life. “But Andrea, it’s just not practical. It’s a waste of time! It’s selfish! It’s too much trouble! Who do you think you are?” Blah blah blah. I hate seeing this done to some other person, even indirectly.
One more thing: sailing around the world alone is a lot more difficult than reading books. It’s not something you do just to impress other people. For one thing, you’re going to be spending most of your time ALONE. Who’s going to clap for you in the middle of the sea? The dolphins? There has to be some other impetus than “breaking a record.” That’s generally a male obsession anyway. That might be part of the motivation, or at least the publicly-stated motivation, because obviously the old reasons people used to do extraordinary things just aren’t believed anymore.
Andrea,
Self-discovery is a lifetime process, she could just as easily have waited till she was twenty-six to do this. Where does this end? Do we keep pushing it till the first 9 year old trying to circle the globe dies?
You know, I am a firm believer in a thing called the buddy system. The Army taught it to me.
I engage in activities with risk, I have been Cave Diving in Florida. I would never Cave Dive alone nor would I encourage a teenager to attempt it even with a partner. I have called and turned dives when something simply didn’t feel right.
I approach such activities from an attitude of risk mimization.
The south Indian Ocean in winter is not risk minimization. It is kind of like trying to sail the North Atlantic in winter.
A 16 year old, no matter how mature they appear, simply don’t know what they don’t know. This is why so many teen drivers wrap their cars around telephone poles.
To quote Clint Eastwood:”A man’s gotta know his limitations.”
I simply think trying to break age-related records in risky activites is dumb.
Must be nice to have rich parents who can afford to pay for such high-risk “self-discovery” adventures. I just hope they also get billed for the full SAR costs, exercise or not.
I could buy into the fact that this initially a stung to be the youngest person to sail around the globe; solo, nonstop. The nonstop part was ruined rather early on when she had to make port due to a technical issue. So, from there I can see how it turned into a journey of discovery and determination, “I’ve started this I’m gonna try to finish it”. Yet, I do think the brash determination of her youth showed through here because one doesn’t have to read very much to find out how treacherous the horn of Africa is. Then, IF you make it past that you have the Indian ocean to contend with. Once it went from being a public stunt to an internal struggle she should have exercised more caution and restraint. Make port at some African location and use that as a momentary pause to gauge the weather and get estimates of what kind of season this is going to be from the locals. What is funny is that more people would probably be terrified of a 16 year old girl alone in African then out on the open water.
I’ll repeat what I wrote earlier: Iâm in favor of letting people go to hell in their own ways, including using drugs. But Iâd sure have qualms about parents who gave their sixteen-year-old daughter heroin. Would YOU be OK with that?
As M Puckett wrote, “Self-discovery is a lifetime process, she could just as easily have waited till she was twenty-six to do this.” It’s not something you do just to impress other people, it’s something you do so you and Mom and Dad can be interviewed on television and write a book and land a deal for a movie-of-the-week.
The fact that her brother did the same thing leads me to suspect that the parents just might be living vicariously through their children.
This whole affair reminds me of the “beauty pageants” in which six-year-old girls “compete” by parading around in high heels and makeup and mascara while their parents cheer them on and plan for the next contest. (Remember JonBenĂ©t Ramsey?) “But they want to do this!” the parents say. Suuure they do …
I can’t believe you people. So sailing a boat is just like taking heroin or being a six-year-old in a beauty pagent. Well sitting in my chair is just like jumping off a cliff or eating a cookie. You’ve made about as much sense.
By the way: TAKING HEROIN IS ILLEGAL. The last time I checked, sailing a boat was still legal. Though I am sure right now there is a movement somewhere to make it illegal or at least so over-regulated that it can’t be done by anyone who isn’t a Kennedy. This will, of course, be to “protect the children.” I guess I should be glad that no one here has yet compared the parents letting their daughter sail to letting her be a prostitute, as someone did on another thread. (Which is another reason I think that none of the Concerned Fatherly Males who are harrumphing in disapproval across the internetosphere would give two rat droppings if the kid in question had been her brother, or another male.)
I’m so glad I’m not a kid now. I thought I had gotten discouraging, disparaging, downbeat “advice” when I was young from my family. Now there’s any entire world ready with wing-clippers. What’s funny is this is all happening on a blog dedicated to promoting commercial space flight.
All of this discussion is rekindling in me a passion to do something big. After the Grand Canyon, my second ambition was to cross the Atlantic in the shortest boat on record. I’m starting to get that itch, again.
The record is currently held by a guy named Hugo Vihlen, who made the crossing in a 5′ 4″ long boat back in 1993.
I intend to do it in a 4′ 11″ long boat.
To mitigate the risk somewhat, my boat will be 300′ wide…
I don’t do well on boats myself. My dream is to drive cross-country and visit all the states I haven’t visited yet. Believe it or not, this modest plan got me remarks such as “You’ll ruin your car!” and “What if you got stranded in the middle of nowhere!” Finally I just stopped talking about it to anyone.
People that want to slap age limits for various activities on the entire population are often very short sighted. People are going to make mistakes through the years. Forcing them to wait for arbitrary age limits just has them making the mistake later in life. The later they make that mistake, the less time they have in life to apply the earned knowledge. Some will not make that mistake with more maturity, they will make bigger ones that are harder to recover from because they have less experience base.
It is similar to not working on rockets at all until you can go to orbit. The lessons not learned will bite hard.
Some activities are a bad idea at any age, like the heroin example by another poster.
Has anybody considered that both kids might have considered it a rite of passage sort of thing? The kind of thing that shows their parents (and themselves) that they can be viewed as skilled, determined adults?
Given how well she handled everything, up to and including losing her mast, I’d say she probably took considerably fewer risks, all told, than a teenager who goes out with friends and drinks a few beers to prove themselves to their peers.
All of this complaining misses the point. The only way I’d be objecting to this is if she had been demonstrably unprepared and/or coerced or unduly encouraged towards it by her parents. The don’t-cross-the-Indian-Ocean-in-June things is the only part that even looks questionable to me.
As for the bill, yes, she (or, given her age and status, her parents) should be prepared to pay for rescue efforts, just as they paid for other safety devices. Why preemptively cry “waste” without determining those details first?
Also, one stupid technical question… how did losing her mast kill her phone signal? Satphones don’t need an antenna that long. Was she actually using shortwave, and was sailing with no satphone at all? Given their commercial availability, I *would* complain about her/her parents’ thinking if that was a cost-cutting measure. It doesn’t add up, though, because she did have EPIRBs, which I believe aren’t cheap.
I think a lot of people here are comparing apples to oranges.
There is an ENORMOUS difference between letting a well-prepared and equipped teen circumnavigate, and what was done here.
Any guesses on how much solo sailing experience she should have before attempting to do a roaring 40’s great capes route circumnavigation, in WINTER? Even competitors in the Vendee around-the world race, one of the deadliest challenges on earth, use that route but do so in summer. So, how much experiance in solo sailing should she have to try that? I don’t know, but I do know it’s not zero (which is how much she had!)
Her brother circumnavigated solo, also setting off having never sailed solo before. However, please don’t say he’s done what she was trying to do; that is false. What he did was a westbound circumnavigation, mainly in the tropics, with quite a few stops. That is a literally world apart from what Abby was trying to do; sail the wildest seas on earth in winter. They call ’em the roaring 40’s for a reason, and in late fall and winter, they don’t roar, they howl. Even the boat’s builder has said that boat wasn’t capable of that run in winter.
The issue here is that she set out in an untested (after a massive refit) boat, and it showed (all the mechanical and electrical problems) plus she had no workup, she just sailed. The second issue is the route; no way in hell should she have tried the roaring 40’s in winter, and she didn’t pick the routing herself; her advisory team did.
Does it strike anyone as ever so slightly odd that Abby’s route was so much more perilous and dangerous than her brother’s? Especially when the family had already had two reality TV series based on sailing adventures in the works?
http://www.magneticent.com/html/projects.htm
I have absolutely no problem with letting a teen circumnavigate, if they are trained, equipped, prepared, and have a route that isn’t insane. Abby Sunderland had none of those things, and that makes all the difference in the world.
Arizona CJ,
They picked that route for her because if they had waited 6 months for better weather, she would have been to old to be eligible to capture the record. It was now or never.
Andrea, you’re an intelligent person and I often agree with what you write. Did you really misunderstand my meaning, or was that just a rhetorical trick?
I’ll spell it out for you: Given that her brother Zac had sailed around the world alone at age 17 only a few months earlier (and set a short-lived record), given that Abby Sunderland is 16 years old, and given that “her” boat almost certainly wasn’t something she’d bought with spare cash but was something that her parents must have purchased, then calling this “her decision” and pretending she wasn’t unduly influenced by her family is ridiculous, as ridiculous as saying that six-year-old girls compete in beauty pageants because it’s THEIR decision.
Maybe she was pushed into it by her parents. Maybe she wanted to one-up her brother. Maybe she wanted to prove she wasn’t “chicken.” Maybe she was stubborn, and wanted to finish what she had started, no matter what the risks. But in my humble opinion it was a piss-poor decision, and it wasn’t a decision that rational parents who already knew some of the likely dangers (see below) should have gone along with.
To refine your analogy, it would be more like HER PARENTS giving her a liter of Stoli and a new Ferrari on her birthday and telling her, “Don’t get into any trouble!”
Which is exactly what I think happened.
Jebus. Isn’t that enough?
Her family already knew that there would be some pretty serious risks, both “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” that could be deadly. Here’s an account of her brother’s voyage:
http://www.successmagazine.com/open-waters/PARAMS/article/851
Note this excerpt:
Sound familiar?
Abby set out with equipment that went bad and had to be repaired en route. The repairs took so long that she missed her chance to set the record for world’s youngest solo circumnavigator when an Australian girl beat her while she waited. Nevertheless, she (and her parents) decided to continue the trip even though the weather had deteriorated as winter came on.
I didn’t cry “waste,” preemptively or not. If it turns out that the parents don’t pay for the SAR effort, then I’ll criticize them for that as a separate issue.
According to interviews, she was talking with her parents on her satphone when it suddenly quit. (Perhaps a splash of salt water shorted something?) I think she should have had a backup phone, though, especially given her brother’s experience. That would have saved everyone a lot of worry, wouldn’t it?
No, it was never or never as far as the record was concerned. According to media reports, she found out that a younger girl had beaten her when she was still in Cape Town.
Pucker, er, Puckett, must you be such a downer?
Murgatroyd also opposes running with scissors, riding a bike without a helmet, lighting firecrackers, souping up a car, contact football, paintball, launching model rockets, and playing in the mud. Not to mention giving these innocent babies a gun and teaching them how to handle & fire it safely.
*Discriminating observers may object that contact football & playing in the mud are the same thing. đ
No Casey, this is more like telling your kid that there’s a magic leprechaun who lives in the garbage disposal, and when the kitchen sink makes that funny loud noise it means that the leprechaun wants to shake hands and be friends.
Try it some time.
Well, Murgatroyd (interesting choice of a name, by the way — yes, I have read David Copperfield), I may not have the big, huge male brain with the gigantic IQ to go with it, but I know the difference between forcing your child to do something illegal or borderline creepy and supporting them when they decide to do something risky.
As for your bizarre leprechaun thing — what? Sorry, I guess I have to belong to Mensa to get that.
Sorry, Andrea, but David Copperfield wasn’t the source of the name. I read Heinlein before I read Dickens.
Persistent inability to address the main point of an argument and focusing instead on irrelevant and details is a common rhetorical trick, and that’s what I was accusing you of doing. You still seem to be doing it.
Most people understand the difference between supporting their children “when they decide to do something risky” and pushing them into doing something life-threatening. Did you frackin’ read the excerpt from the magazine story that listed the life-threatening situations Abby’s older brother Zac was in on his voyage? And yet her parents put Abby into a situation in which many of the problems her brother had either weren’t addressed or were even worse. Did you read Arizona CJ’s comment?
Casey claimed to somehow discern that I oppose “giving these innocent babies a gun and teaching them how to handle & fire it safely.” (Wrong, by the way, unless he wasn’t being sarcastic and meant actual babies.) OK, here’s another of those analogy thingies: What most parents do when they support their children in a decision that has commonplace risks is like giving a kid a rifle and enrolling her in a firearms safety course. What the Sunderlands did to their daughter was like giving her a pistol and telling her “Your brother just played Russian Roulette, and he thought it was kewl!“
People make bad decisions all the time, including parents. Who is responsible for protecting a teenager? I think the bar aught to be pretty high before we give the answer: the state over parents.
She lived through it. She learned. Perhaps her parents did as well. If they didn’t, it’s luck of the parental draw.
If the problem today were too much parental control I might feel different about it. But today, the state wants to run all our lives.
If you don’t want me to “focus on irrelevant details” then don’t use them in your comments. I mean, maybe this is just my strange little habit, but I only tend to write things I want people to pay attention to. Next time could you please maybe let us know what parts of your comments you want us to read, and what parts you want to ignore, so we can skip over those?
Anyway, not knowing which parts I was supposed to not read, I read your whole comment, and it looked like the brother had some difficulties, and the daughter had some difficulties, but he survived, and then she survived, and all it looks like to me is that maybe the family has different standards of danger than you do. There’s nothing you can do about that; it’s not your call to make. The family broke no laws (yet), except apparently the unwritten one about not making complete strangers who they don’t even know uncomfortable. If you are so worried about this girl, perhaps you should write the family a letter. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your opinion.
As to your name — I haven’t read a lot of Heinlein, so the only Murgatroyd I remember is the stepfather who crushed the spirit of David Copperfield’s mother and sent the boy to a workhouse. This is one reason I decided to not use a nickname when I started blogging. Speaking of Heinlein, I wonder what he would have thought about all this. from what little I recall from my youthful reading of a few of his juveniles, he wasn’t necessarily against adventuresome kids. Of course those were only works of fiction, not at all meant to inspire kids into getting into dangerous pursuits like space exploration.
“Pucker, er, Puckett, must you be such a downer?”
That you Fritz?
Ken, where did the state come into this? I don’t buy into the statist notion that just because something might be stupid, or dangerous to the person who does it, that there should be a law against it. (Things that endanger unwilling third parties are another matter entirely.) As Niven and Pournelle said, “Think of it as evolution in action.”
And while I don’t want the state to make it illegal to take risks, I also retain the right to call someone a damned fool for taking a risk that far outweighs the benefits, and to call the parents something worse than damned fools for persuading their minor daughter to take life-threatening risks while not taking the risks themselves.
I’m not sure what she learned. She wanted to have the French rescue ship tow her boat to a port for repair, but apparently that isn’t feasible. Now she reportedly wants to continue with another boat.
Andrea, you have a gift for understatement!
I think it’s worth acknowledging that both Abby and Zac would have died had it not been for the kindness of strangers.
Well, we can’t ask him, but here are some words he put into a respected character’s’ mouth in Have Spacesuit:
As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, I suspect that Heinlein would not have considered sloppiness a good strategy.
The goal of an adventure like sailing around the world, for most rational people at least, is to accomplish the mission rather than to deliberately put one’s self in mortal danger and then narrowly escape.
This could have turned out much worse, and not just for her:
French authorities called [the rescue] a “delicate operation” and at one point the fishing boat’s captain fell into the ocean. “He was fished out in difficult conditions” and is in good health, said a statement from the French territory of Reunion Island.
Ken, where did the state come into this?
You are the state when you retain the right to call someone a damned fool, you’re not just making a judgment which you have every right to do; giving voice to that judgment means you are making a case for taking rights away from parents. You’re influencing people with your opinion. Laws are codification of opinion. Otherwise you’re claiming your words have no power at all.
Iâm not sure what she learned. …she reportedly wants to continue with another boat
So if she didn’t learn what you wanted her to learn, she learned nothing? I might agree with you that both she and her parents are fools or worse. But I repeat, the danger today is not that we have too much liberty.
Whoa.
(Murgatroyd backs away, carefully …)
Run, Statist, run!
Heh heh. I couldn’t help it.
Anyway, I don’t think Murgatroyd is a statist who wants to take kids away from their parents and have them raised in sterile, regimented dormitories where they will be taught to chant “I love Big Mother!” I’m pretty sure, anyway.
I didn’t mean to hit the points so hard either, but still, what is the state if not the people that make it up? Some execute more power than others of course.