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.
Yup.
Good for your granddaughter! One of my church friends has a daughter who got her CNA license the summer after her junior year of high school, and already has a scholarship/internship lined up for nursing school.
There is a great deal of ground between sitting around doing nothing, and doing something foolishly dangerous that, even if completed safely, would not really add any value to the world.
I disagree about CPS. We have too much government involvement in our lives now.
In 1850 the life expectancy was 40. I looked it up. Our ancestors didn't have time to be kids at 16. Life expectancy now is 77.7 years. Comparing her with 16 year olds from our history is misleading.
Thats impossible. According to the people who defend the Sunderland fiasco all young people do now is have babies and play video games. (s)
Hopefully public scorn and ridicule.
Homeschooling doesn’t make them kooks. Sending their daughter around the world in rough seas in a small boat does make them kooks. I think all kids should be homeschooled.
Scorn?
Ridicule?
This teen needs a neurological workup and probably a great deal of therapy.
To set a record that a 15 year old will break? And then a 14 year old? How young shall we allow them to be to sail alone simply so they can say "I DID IT!"?
>> Homeschooling doesn’t make them kooks. Sending their daughter around the world in rough seas in a small boat does make them kooks.
+1
I would add: “sending their daughter... for PROFIT”.
Pretty low-life if you ask me.
Christopher Columbus was a grown man. He sailed with 3 ships much larger than Abbys little boat. He had a full crew and he was on a mission that actually was going to do some good. No comparison whatsoever.
Not really a relevant comparison. Most of that increase is at birth and in the first five years of life; LOTS more infant mortality back then.
Get past five years old, and life expectancies between the current period and a century back even out a lot. That IS a statistic.
So the comparison between her and sixteen year olds a century back is less misleading that you might think.
And he didn’t do it in winter. Still a risky trip.
Ah but it will affect sponsors. Their public image is everything. And the American Sailing Association did NOT endorse this trip. There will be problems.
This teen needs a neurological workup
I'm sure she'll be thoroughly examined when she reaches port.
Homeschoolers I've known have always been deeply concerned about extracurricular and appropriate social activities for their kids, so that they aren't isolated from the world -- and neighborhood.
I’m all for making dreams come true and individual initiative, but this girl is very, very lucky to be alive. Her father and mother need to behave more like responsible adults.
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.
“Abby should sue all of her sponsors for child endangerment”
Sue her own sponsors, how conservative. And i hate to rain on the parade, but i love how everyone is so concerned about the safety of searchers, and professional fishermen in the antarctic oceans. These men are of course well-known for avoiding all risk. In truth, those rescuers were at their happiest,,,and not in need of protection from self righeous nervous nellies.
Brave girl, good family, daring greatly, successful business,, It’s an American fairy tale.
Beak out the sextant (or hand held GPS) and sail by jury rig or motor to Isl st Paul 170nmNW (3-8 days).
Yeah. I read 30 to 40%. I can't imagine the heartbreak.
So the comparison between her and sixteen year olds a century back is less misleading that you might think.
Not really but if you wanna go with that, fine. You should read mortality sheets. Plenty of teens died of mysterious ailments. Women died in childbirth. There were no guarantees and medicine was not what it is now. It isn't the infant mortality rate that made life expectancy 40 yrs old.
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