Posted on 06/14/2010 6:58:42 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Abby Sunderland's recent adventure has everyone questioning teen safety. It all depends one how one defines it.
Parents, where are your teenage daughters? They had better be "safe" at home watching the perverse antics of Disney role models like Miley Cyrus or Lindsay Lohan on TV. Perhaps they're "safe" at school, where they are being educated about the sexual revolution, and in some states, being ushered "safely" by administrators to a clinic where the abortion procedure will be administered with you parents none the wiser. At the very worst, one can rest assured that even if America's daughters have ventured to a house party -- where the parents have purchased and readied all the alcohol and prophylactics -- never fear, because those parents have taken each attendee's keys. All are locked inside and "safe"!
In any of these cases, parents, hit your knees and thank God that your daughter does not run the risk that Abby Sunderland does. As far as I can tell, that is the ruggedly individualist risk of running roughshod, acquiring and exercising true grit, and cultivating a classical skill a tad more aged than cheerleading or speed-texting. The progressive parent asks: Is Abby Sunderland a teenage girl at all? Not a typical one: this aberration from the norm, and not any safety violation, is the true charge against Abby and the Sunderlands.
Cue the chirping sectaries in the news media; they're up. It's always a little strange -- and quite awkward -- when those relativists in the news muster enough moral sentiment, from time to time, to actually impugn someone. When they do so, it is never the right target. News folks have usually by that point stepped around dens of thieves and vipers to get to their next "fall guy": usually just a harmless, individualist soul not well-attuned to the drumbeat of liberalism. This is the case, no doubt, with the Sunderlands, whose foreheads are now feeling all the applied moral heat of the progressive-parent crucible, represented by popular news sources. Happily for the Sunderlands, progressive heat is rather tepid.
In a befuddling combo, society mavens prescribe both naturalist coddling and sexual prompting for our daughters. While the progressive approach to parenting has usually sounded that "children should make and learn from their own mistakes," stalwart young Abby's adventure has proven that liberal parents mean this only in the moral and sexual contexts. Trying your experienced hand at a legitimate craft which requires fortitude, skill, and even phronesis (Greek for practical knowledge) ought to be excluded from the relevance of such a dictate, apparently. In other words, the goal of child-rearing is, according to these "progressives," to cloister our daughters from the reality of the amoral, natural forces of the world while exposing them to all the immoral, conventional ones. And contrary to the teachings of the best thinkers ever produced, it is false that there are things worse than death.
This renders young Abby Sunderland neither fish nor fowl. She is neither parentally coddled from the earth's forces nor suffering from ennui sufficient to land her in the toil and moil of "harmless" teen concupiscence. The lib establishment cannot accept that a young woman has looked for her jollies outside the musty teen world that they have so deified. Hollywood, for one example, is an industry of middle-aged burnouts looking fondly backward to the empty promise of the teens; conversely, Sunderland is a teen who looks to the horizon of more meaningful post-teen endeavors. Neither fish nor fowl also because she was neither made male, like her brother, who performed the same feat at seventeen, nor made supple and mediocre like the pseudo-sexy pudgemeisters on the Disney channel (whose corporate aim, I've gathered, is to muddle all the bright-line age requirements in the heterosexual book).
In that vein, where in the world are the feminists, if not at the side of the Sunderlands? Surprisingly, feminists might be of some use in this case (perhaps they've forsworn usefulness): A young woman would be denied the facility of her well-honed skills on account of her gender! If the true aim of feminism is to show that females possess all the desiderata males do, one might mistake the silence prompted by Abby's sailing excellence for laudation. To those who deny that Abby possesses the skills requisite for her journey, please take another look at the course that she pursued. She made it halfway around. One abjectly unequipped for such a try would not make it that far. So why did she fail?
Answering this question is perhaps the most prominent lesson instructed by the whole affair. It's the ultimate classical lesson, learnable from the ultimate classical craft: the tragic worldview amor fati, loving life through both success and failure. One can make all the right moves and possess all the right skills and still fail. If our pudgy youth had a dose of well-fought, weather-worn failure, it would be a national shot in the arm. Contrary to the bumper stickers, this is not "mean" or "unfair." It is life. Abby Sunderland is hip to this tragic lesson, stoically quipping, "The long and the short of it is, well, one long wave and one short mast." God bless her...and her parents, who evidently made the way ready for such precocious wisdom. Such practical wisdom will grace her life with successes in the long run, no doubt, just as the failure to acquire it will render an overly soft, overly safe, overly sexed society...and one ironically impotent.
I know a lot of broke people, but none with yachts. And yes i know, “her sponsors paid for it” etc,,
But it seems to indicate a lot of people, with a lot on the line, seemed to view it as something worthy of being associated with. Hmmm
BINGO!!!!
Your differentiating between “she” and her parents is where you may have missed a critical factor.
That factor, seemingly unknown to you, is called “family”.
I have no idea what you mean. I guess you have no response to common a sense question. It's obvious that to set a new record, someone younger will have to do it. How young are you willing to go?
That will be this year, actually. Laura Dekker, the Dutch girl who was prevented by the courts from attempting a RTW at 14, turns 15 in September.
She plans to leave Lisbon soon thereafter on a multi-stop voyage via the Panama Canal and, curiously, the Suez. I suspect she'll think better of that and round Capes Agulhas and Good Hope.
The American Sailing Association wasn't one of them.
Well, you did say that people back then didn’t have time to waste, because of short lifespans. That they did things at 16 because they could only expect to hit 40 on average. (mean age? median age?)
The *clear implication* of that statement, is that today we don’t need to be as grown up at 16 as they were. If i was wrong, then please tell us what age would be appropriate for someone to shoulder the same responsibilities, as our ancestors did at 16?
Hopefully that will happen with sailing.
It would be wonderful if she just plain thought better of it. Maybe the American Sailing Association will follow aviations lead and set an age limit.
I wish the authority that recognizes records in sailing would make the boat put up bond for any cost related to rescue or admin expense for a country. Plus require 18 years old as the entry level.
I am so frosted about this.
Sending your kid to her potential death is child abuse in the first degree. The kid failed, was behind schedule, put in for repairs and was then advised by her father to continue the march.
Put those parents in a Dingy in the middle of the Southern Ocean in Winter. Let's see what hero's they are. That girl was facing weather worse that what crashed her for the next two months.
Honor the rescuers. The fishing boat crew that got her lost production, and the captain, almost his life. Fell into the water. I'm hot about this.
Check out real sailors comments, post #2944.
http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/index.php?showtopic=102689&st=2925
Ditto!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you for such an articulate rational knowledgable posting!
Well, there is a picture of Abbey's church youth group hung prominently near the nav center on Wild Eyes. Obviously they mean something to her...
Thanks! I’m glad to hear it.
Dude there are 40 year olds now that act like 16 year olds. It's a societal problem. Life was a lot more serious back then. People were more self-reliant as gubmint didn't bail them out.
And obviously there should be. This child doesn't even know how long she lost consciousness when the mast hit her and gave her a concussion.
The captain of the fishing boat which rescued her fell overboard and almost lost his life, had to be rescued himself, and the fishermen could not fish while trying to locate this lost at sea 16 year old child.
I think it is undeniable that Abby is a remarkably skilled and, self-disciplined 16 year old girl... and that fact indicates that her mother and father have behaved like responsible parents when raising their daughter, in dramatic contrast to most parents these days.
Her father says he’s broke, and news articles mentioned that they have 7 kids with another on the way. Time to thank God for the wife and kids and take on another job to pay the bills. It is NOT time to send your 16 yr. old daughter around the world in a small sailboat so you can stay home making babies and watching the cash roll in from endorsements and commercial ventures.
You don't even make sense here, at least not financially... If he's broke with 7+ kids, I thinks it's time for him to get creative. If he has the opportunity to benefit financially from this or anything else, he should absolutely make the most of it.
“Comparing her with 16 year olds from our history is misleading.”
Perhaps you might not want to bet the ranch on that premise.
Both physical and sexual maturation are partially a function of nutrition and general health. That means both physical and sexual maturation are, if anything, more likely to occur earlier now than under the conditions of a century ago.
Another observation, females mature at least two years earlier than males.
She just had the bad luck to catch the wrong wave at the wrong time/place.
Google “freak waves” and you may find it easier to understand what happened. Both the parents and the daughter made reasoned, informed decisions which were properly theirs to make.
“Theirs”, not ours. And most emphatically, not “Da Gooberments”.
Actually, in the Tudor time period, at least as relates to the nobility, and members of the court, the average life expectancy for a man was in his 50-60’s. The average life expectancy for a woman was into her early 30’s. The things that killed most women were childbirth, complications or fever after childbirth (this was what killed the 3rd and 6th wives of Henry VIII), and multiple miscarriages or pregnancies.
As women died so much earlier, they were having babies at a much younger age. In Tudor Englandit was not unusual for men to be in their 50’s and be on the second or third or even 4th wife. Men who were in their 50’s were married to girls who were 13 or 14. Surely you don’t think that should be done today?
That's a matter of opinion.
In 1968, with no sailing experience, he competed in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, aboard a 30ft yacht called Dytiscus retiring just past the Cape of Good Hope
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