cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21954268
Mom Jailed for Letting 10-Year-Old Walk Alone to Town
“I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” says Brittany Patterson.
MoViNg tO tHe sUbUrB/cOuNtRySiDe fOr tHe kIdS
A woman who saw him walking alongside the road—speed limit: 25 in some places, 35 in others—asked him if he was OK. He said yes.
Nevertheless, she called the police.
Traitor.
The plan (from child protective services) would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son’s phone allowing for his location to be monitored.
If I were the child, I’d forget my phone at home very often. A town like that probably has a no-phone school anyways.
People don’t care about children apparently. Spatial appropriation is an important aspect of childrens’ development. Children cannot lobby for themselves in the same way most adult social groups can do.
The town has 375 people.
That’s not a suburb…
Better?
Yup!
You aren’t allowed to have a phone in school and my son is 10. The teachers will take it away.
Seems less to do with cars and more to do with citizen/government stupidity:
“It’s not quite a mile from his house.”
Looks like Georgia DOES have a “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law…
The sheriff disagreed.
“She kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” recalls Patterson.
‘anything’ could have happened if he’d stayed home too. ‘Anything’ is a low bar. ;)
In a town of 370 people? How many cars were on the road? 3?
Probably around 370 in total, but at any given moment, 3.
I live in a rural community. What scares me the most is the dumbass hicks flying around in their giant vehicles, both old and young. They’re always driving like their houses are on fire.
When I go running on country roads in spandex and sandals, the hicks in the trucks go by real friggin’ slowly. Like, aggressively slowly.
Here’s where the problem is. The sheriff is viewing the potential for the kid to get hit by a person driving a car as the kid’s fault, when of course the fault should lie completely with her person operating heavy machinery.
She needs a fucking hobby besides acting like some pedo. 100 percent if this was a man watching a kid it would be taken much differently.
not quite a mile from his house
It wasn’t even far. They live on 16 acres, he could be just as far into the woods and still be on their property.
very funny to see this coming from Reason, a libertarian rag that hates public transit
I’ve seen Reason speak highly of Japan’s privatized public transport
Which public transport? Tokyo Metro is publicly-owned. Some of the JR branches are still publicly-owned. JR was only privatized in the late 80s as an anti-labor move and to deflect from the unpopularity of closing unprofitable rural lines. But of course the government built most of the network, including the first shinkansen lines.
It sounds like they’re praising it in Japan and saying “of course it could never work here, Americans are just genetically predisposed to cars”.
Right. I will say there is a lot of the US where cars make sense because they use the same roads that farm equipment uses (which does not make much sense to build rail for), but in the cities (and thus the suburbs) it seemed largely cultural from any historical analysis I’ve seen (with segregation, excessive monopolization of passenger rail, and the advent of modern advertising).
Angry, vindictive Internet dwellers love to identify with the left while arguing on behalf of libertarians. So long as Somebody On The Other Side is getting punished the specifics of self responsibility and internal consistency don’t matter too much.
Angry and vindictive? You’re the one hate-reading a community you clearly don’t like
It’s not hate reading, it’s loving honesty. The article frames the story as an anti-government civil liberty issue, and the community is letting blind rage at the mention of a car create a blind spot over self-defeating libertarianism.
Wild that they said he was found “downtown” in a town of 370.
Busy downtown huh?
“terminal car-brain” 😂 you guys’ll pathologize anything
Dear Santa, for Christmas this year I want a deck of Internet meme psychology tarot cards. The Narcissist. The Gas Lighter. The Driver. I have not been a good boy, thank you for understanding.
Not everything. But you might have pathological difficulty grasping irony.