Time for a little more humanity

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2016 (3680 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s hard to imagine the whole province wasn’t in mourning Saturday when news came the body of little Chase Martens was found, in a creek not far from his farmhouse near Austin. For four days, hordes of volunteers streamed to join professional searchers, picking their way through fields, wooded lots and ditches.

His mother last spotted him Tuesday evening, out the kitchen window as she prepared supper. It’s now clear not long afterwards, the two-year-old wandered down to the creek, where he’d gone on occasion to chop wood with his dad. An autopsy has confirmed the boy drowned. The news stilled hundreds of praying hands. Halted the feet of those who spent an estimated 30,000 and more hours of carefully treading so as not to step on clues in the hardened ground and stubble grass. Eighty-four painful hours of waiting, wondering and wishing ending in tragedy. You could almost hear hearts crack.

That was the best of Manitoba; neighbours, friends and strangers rallying together like a big, spontaneous family to search along with those on horseback, on ATVs, in the helicopter overhead, decked out in diving equipment or flying the drones. Parents Thomas Martens and Destiny Turner issued a statement to express their gratitude for the overwhelming “love and kindness our community has shown” in its tireless support throughout the ordeal.

And yet some people couldn’t leave bad enough alone. Chase’s parents have become fair game to the unforgiving who could not resist piling on in social media or posting on news sites about the fact the tot was allowed outside the house, unsupervised. Pointing out the obvious, they engaged in online debates or diatribes that salted the wounds of the grieving. Grace and decency, never a strong point of the Internet, are in short supply in the sanctimonious who refuse to give anyone already reeling from self-recrimination just a little breathing space.

It’s only natural to wish away the “if-onlys” and cruel things have always been muttered when tragedy strikes children, but there’s something particularly predatory about those armed with little more than opinion who leap to the pulpit on social media.

Parenting has always been a minefield. For all the effort and wisdom, kid-proofing is a just a marketing fantasy and modern families have ample opportunity to trip the many devices that in an instant can shred their little piece of ordinary bliss. It may be that today’s moms and dads are the most judged in history. They navigate between the finger-waggers ready to pounce on any slip in attention, and the experts who warn of the dire developmental consequences that helicopter parents bring upon a coddled child. The screech of tires, the splash in the slough — powerful, every-day wakeups to the perils of the urban and rural landscape. It is simply inconceivable that any one of us has never felt that moment of panic that comes with a simple mistake, the poor decision when the guard was down.

How many of us have not had to thank God or good fortune for the near misses that remind us we are nothing if not fallible? Yet it shouldn’t take that kind of honest reality check to let empathy, or at least the wisdom of silence, be the better advocate.

The heaviest coffins, as they say, hold the smallest bodies. The unbearable weight of the loss of a boy all but 30 pounds rests on the shoulders of those who most loved him. Most of Manitoba, at least, has shown Chase’s parents that many more of us are ready to help carry their burden.