the Global Observatory

The Criminal

Judith Warner, an NYT columnist, claims today that a case in which prosecutors are pursuing legal action against a mother who had endangered her children by dropping them off at the mall, without any form of direct, or even indirect, adult supervision, is about how:

our country’s resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women is spiraling out of control.

Wait. What?

The woman in question was not innocent. What she did was unforgivable (maybe not prosecutable):

[she] drove her three kids and two of their friends — two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 — to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her…

The pre-teens in question … ditched their charges in the purse section by the cosmetics counter in Macy’s while they went off to try on some shirts…

Not only did she endanger her own children, but also her friends’ children; Children placed under her care and supervision; Children who were to depend on her for their security and well-being for that period of time.

And, she didn’t go off to work, for a meeting, or for any other essential purpose. She went home to rest. Wow. What a woman!

I can believe that Bozeman is a safe place, but no place in the world is safe enough to leave your kids unsupervised in a public place, especially children as young as these were.

So, she was wrong. Should she be prosecuted for this error in judgment?

If this happened in Tacoma, I would be campaigning to send her to jail right now. In Bozeman, maybe not. But, that’s just my distant impression and short experience of a small city in Montana. Nothing happened to her kids, but that was probably just good fortune.

Should she be sent to prison? No, but, prosecuted, fined and put on probation, for sure. Sending her to prison would deprive her kids of their mother, and that would be wrong.

At any rate, how is this now about any “resentment” of educated women? Apparently for a liberal feminist like Warner, any time an educated woman, or, rather, a liberal woman, is tried for her stupidity, she is being persecuted.

The Feminist

Hot damn if it’s a far-left, probably communist, professor like this Bridget Kevane, a master of Latin American and Latino literature. Then it’s a violation of human rights, animal rights, plant rights, the Geneva Convention, the UN Human Rights Charter, the Magna Carta, the American Constitution, the European Constitution, and every other such document ever drafted on the face of this Earth. It’s probably also racist, causes global warming and denies healthcare to millions of Americans.

Kevane should be awarded a Gold Medal for fighting against such blatant persecution of and discrimination against “educated” women. Remember, she also gets paid less than her male colleagues. Affront upon affront!

And, by the way, Warner isn’t just any random liberal. Her resume reads like a veritable cornucopia of elite, far-left constricted thinking.

Back to the matter at hand, the prosecutor in the case wrote thus to Kevane’s lawyer:

…professors are incapable of seeing the real world around them because their ‘heads are always in a book’

True. Professors only think of perfect solutions, not the actual reality.

I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education

This guy hit the nail on the head. You would NOT expect somebody with a “major” education to commit this kind of stupidity, and, when they do, they should NOT be treated differently, as in preferential treatment.

In fact, the punishment should be even more severe than otherwise.

We keep hearing about regular men and women endangering their children by leaving them in cars, malls, homes, gyms and elsewhere. I don’t recall ever reading about resentment of well-educated men or of red-neck women.