Well, it was a relief, wasn't it, to have a lost Boy Scout this week to break the tedium of Missing White Woman/Girl Child (soon to have its own cable network, no doubt), complete with a happy Hollywood horseshit ending?
I don't mean to make light of the agony of Brennan Hawkins' family during the four-day ordeal. I speak as a parent who had a child go missing from the front yard for 15 hours (a 6-year-old girl child, no less! Prime cable fodder!), complete with flashing lights of cop cars in the driveway, and search and rescue teams looking for a body in nearby ravines. I cannot begin to imagine the torture of four days of knowing your child is lost in the wilderness, so I say, "Huzzah and hurrah for lost children found!"
But I've been finding myself going very meta lately, trying to string together all these "lost white innocents" stories and find a meaning to them in the bigger picture of where our society is headed and why we seem to be displaying an obsession of late with missing individuals. I thought the lost Boy Scout story was going to help clarify my thinking on it, on what these victims had in common that so captured our imagination (my fuzzy thinking was lumping Terry Schiavo in there as well, as a kind of "missing" consciousness in absentia), but then I ran across the following quotes from the Hawkins' family and I found myself veering into another meta-direction altogether:
"We've also told him don't talk to strangers. ... When an ATV or horse came by, he got off the trail. ... When they left, he got back on the trail."
"His biggest fear, he told me, was someone would steal him," she said.
Brennan's uncle, Bob Hawkins, said his nephew may have been afraid to contact the strangers because they weren't using the password his family had adopted.
What the ...? It sounds to me as if Brennan was so inoculated with "stranger danger" that he postponed his own rescue - possibly by days - by dashing off into the brush whenever someone approached. Here we have a Boy Scout, whom I presume has been at least partially schooled in the dangers of the wild - exposure, dehydration, starvation, tumbling off cliffs - fearing fellow human beings more than raw nature.
This, my friends, is nuts.
I'm not blaming the parents here; we've all done this with our children, warned them of candy-bearing strangers and the vague (very vague) atrocities that can follow in their wake. And as much as I'd like to blame the Bush administration solely, all they've done is ratchet up the noise on the "scary stranger" trend through terror alerts and constant diversion of airplanes bearing passengers with too many vowels or too many consonants in their names to ring comfortably in western ears.
What Brennan's scrambles into the underbrush point to, for me, is an erosion of trust in civil society, of the motives of our fellow human beings. Even though every statistic I've ever seen on the victimization of children (or nubile young white women, for that matter) screams that they are much more likely to be harmed by family members or trusted known adults, we still cling to the notion that strangers are venal and predatory, and that people we know are "good."
We fear each other on a primal level - and I realize this is an instinctual part of our human nature, a given - but I'd always supposed that one of the reasons we'd entered into civilization and its social compact in the first place was to ensure that even people we aren't related to would be restrained from harming us. And it seems to me it's worked pretty well. Every one of us, every day, interacts with strangers to our individual advantage, and rarely does death or destruction result. Yet we can't seem to put in place a rational over-ride to this default of fear of the unknown.
It seems to me that the current state of laissez-faire capitalism and the assault on our social and economic safety net feeds into this "primal fear" phenomenon in a truly destructive manner. It's every man, woman and child for himself, and Brennan's avoidance of potential rescuers makes perfect sense when viewed against this subliminal background.
But I'm left with the nagging feeling that not only is this an irrational and crazy-making way to live on an individual level, it will in the long run prove to be the downfall of our species. We are, we seem to forget in scary times, primarily social creatures and always have been. Cooperation, trust and community are cornerstones of our species' success. If we can't begin to restore our trust in fellow "rescuers," I don't know what's to become of us. And I can offer no immediate solutions either; this entire diary is simply a self-indulgent exercise in puzzled observation with no prescriptions offered. My hope is that others can offer suggestions because I sure can't.
All I can say is: Happy homecoming, Brennan. Please remember when your story is made into a Movie of the Week that Americans unknown to you were sending out prayers, checking the news and mounting searches on your behalf. And that it was strangers who brought you back to your family.