Strangers on a train
While I was waiting for the train during an afternoon commute last week, I ran into him for the second time. A little boy, probably five or six. He ran wild on the platform. He played on the train tracks. He smashed the pay phone against a metal rail. He screamed at people. Last time, he also threw rocks at cars in a nearby parking lot.
The first time, when the train arrived, I went to a different car. Last week, this little boy and I were on the same car. This little boy ran around the crowded train, sitting in any seat he could find, laying on the filthy floor, talking with anyone. He screamed at people. He threw a bottle. This little boy nearly fell as the train lurched, only saved from a bad fall by other passengers. He whipped a bottle cap that almost hit an infant in the face. The infant’s mother shielded her baby with her hand. When the infant, a few minutes later, began babbling mildly, this little boy repeatedly yelled, “Shut up! Shut up!” My fellow commuters and I did nothing.
Neither did his mother. Both times, she sat impassively. I tried to read her. Exasperation? Exhaustion? Intoxication? Indifference? Ignorance? When someone finally stopped the boy from throwing rocks at cars, she wandered over and jerked the boy’s arm, cursed at him, and returned to her apathy. She said not a word while he smashed the phone, threw the bottle, yelled at passengers. She watched the bottle lazily roll back and forth on the train floor.
My fellow commuters and I locked eyes many times. But, good citizens that we are, no one did anything. (My heroic role in this story was picking up the bottle as I exited the train and chucking it into the trash.)
What is there to do? This little boy is not our child.
He’s someone else’s responsibility. But what will happen to a little boy whose mother lets him run around on the tracks and smash a phone against a rail when he’s small? If a train doesn’t kill him, what are his prospects? What will his life be like? And who will pay for the results?
I should have asked him nicely to stop. I should have talked to his mom. But what if mom responds by punching him in the face? Unfortunately, I saw such a scene unfold — on the train. A very young mother was teasing her son, who was about four, with a cell phone, just playing around. But when she tired of the game and he kept grabbing at it, as four-year-olds do, she smashed him in the face, leaving him bloody and screaming.
I picked up the phone that night and called transit police. The phone rang and rang, and eventually I hung up. As the phone rang, I thought of what I was doing. So I call the police? Call youth services? Call… do… what? Then what happens to mom and then to him? What vengeance does mom exact on him if she’s humiliated in front of the police? Ashamed of my indecision and inaction, I went home.
We regulate, certify, weigh, license, and measure almost everything in our culture. Except parenting. Here I go down a slippery slope that’s easy to see the end of: an Orwellian nightmare of big brother government. We don’t interfere with the family. In an imperfect world, we think imperfect parents are better than a meddling, I guess it would have to be governmental body that would ensure people had some rudimentary competency and means before bringing a child into the world.
Could we create a fair metric of what it takes to be prepared to raise someone successfully? That may seem impossible, but consider how costly, dangerous, and soul-wasting our hands-off approach of entrusting children to bad, dangerous, incompetent parenting has been: How many of the problems we deal with are the eventual result of bad childhoods? I was going to include some links, but you can do this easily enough. Go to Google Scholar and type in your search of choice: [bad parenting crime] [child abuse crime] [economic effect child neglect]. You could spend the rest of the week reading these studies.
So we do end up paying — maybe with our own blood when we are victims of a crime — for ignoring these problems, and we intervene anyway, but after the damage is done, through social services, jail, police.
Our culture is not unique in this way. Recently, writer Mark Edmundson wrote about what poet William Blake, who 200 years ago was shocked by the misery in London, would say today. Blake, in one of the striking images in his poem “London,” depicted the misery of poor child chimney sweeps, who were basically enslaved. Who was protecting them? Not the church. Not their parents. Not the government. Edmundson asks what Blake would see now, here: “Many American children are as trapped in their own lives as the poor chimney sweeps were trapped in theirs.” The massive destruction of potential, of lives, is nothing new.
We have never had the cultural will or political creativity to stand up for the children who need a champion most. We have a patchwork system of foster care, overwhelmed schools, and programs like Toys for Tots floating on a patchwork attitude of “not my child” and “government out of the family.” Parents, no matter how flawed and screwy they are, get to keep on going until they do something horrific.
Then we expect schools to fix the problem. We ask schools the impossible. The rock-throwing, phone-smashing, bottle-tossing little boy is in a classroom somewhere. What is that like for him, his teacher, and the fellow students? How are teachers supposed to educate a kid who comes to school with a bag of chips and soda in her belly and a black eye from mom’s boyfriend?
Maybe if we shifted the conversation about children from liberal or even humanitarian grounds to public investment number one, we would all pay more attention. Irresponsible, harmful, dangerous child-raising, when viewed broadly, might cost us more than anything else. The results of parental apathy, anger, neglect, and abuse mark themselves in almost every problem we face.
What did I do about our little bottle-thrower? Nothing. I got off the train and went home, salving my conscience with my interaction with my own kids and the kids I coach and the students I teach. Maybe next time I’ll try to talk to his mother. Maybe I’ll print this piece and hand it to her. Maybe some day I’ll see that a little boy playing on the tracks was killed by a train.
But he’ll remain just one stranger I saw on the train. He’s only one problem I ignored. If I read about a crime he commits years from now, I won’t know it was him. We have always had the stomach to look past a much larger group of such problems, making a decision that has become a comfortable habit: We’ll ignore now and pay the price later.
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I agree whole-heartedly.
I think the problem arises when the rules apply to everyone — including those of us who are doing a good job raising our kids. And the same lawyers who manipulate the system now will end up screwing the good parents.
I think we need to stop looking at nuts and bolts, the practical, the black and white facts… We need to start taking morality and spirituality into consideration more often. We don’t need the government to tell us to do the right thing. We just need to start paying more attention to our consciences.
Everyone is worried about being offened and people become immediately defensive. How about being willing to admit that you’re not perfect and being open to improving yourself?
Scott presents this for what it is: An unsolvable conundrum. On one hand, if people don’t have a right to raise their children as they see fit, what do they have a right to do? On the other, what moral obligation do the people surrounding that family have? — what social obligation? We’re way beyond “it takes a village”.
Interesting story. I particularly like the sense of frustration Scott evokes in the story at the inability ot address the problem.
My instincts say you should have tripped the child so he would have learned that one day Society will stop these antics even if his parents don’t. Perhaps sparing him from one day expiring on the train tracks.
I am also forced to think about similiar events that go unchallenged. Largely this occurs in highly populated areas, where everyone expects someone else to respond, so no one responds. To Chris’s point, in smaller communities the Village acts to address these situations, in a City it does not.
Upon reflection, I have decided. You should have tripped him and laughed. The same abivalence that everyone else showed the child would have spared you any grieve. This way the child and the parent learns that society will act in the absence of a better choice. You can remain annonymous in your actions and feel rewarded for providing positive feedback on accepted norms. Something the child must eventually learn or perish.