Can You Smell It?

There was a day care in the area that was closed down, and its operators arrested. Someone went to the authorities to report that their daughter had been molested by an older child. Authorities found adults living there who were had not had child abuse clearances run, and who were living in rooms with human feces. There were other details, but the line that stood out to me was the quote from a grandfather who had picked up his grandchild from the facility on at least one occasion. He said he had noted the smell and it worried him. My first reaction was to demonize anyone that would leave their children somewhere that smelled like feces. I wanted to jump on something and proclaim for the world that if I picked up my son or daughter from day care and smelled feces, or saw people who looked the folks in the mug shots working there, I would have never brought my daughter back. I would have done it if I hadn’t been eating lunch with my children. As a matter of fact when I returned to work full time, ever so briefly, we went to meet with a woman who was offering child care from her home. Her home was a mess. Her husband told us how he had on some occasion told his three year old to stop crying and act like a man. There was no way in hell we were going to leave our daughter there. We found a great care provider who had a wonderful welcoming home, polite and caring children of her own, and was a great early influence in both of our children’s lives. Then we sent our daughter to an expensive pre-school, choosing to live a spare existence in order to make it work. The key part of all of this, of course, is that we had a choice. There are a lot of folks that don’t have that many choices. They may only be able to afford feces filled homes. They certainly can’t afford many thousands of dollars a year. Our choices are limited … we have to do public school … but not shitty. Some people’s choices are shitty. Some children suffer the consequences of the shitty options their parents had. It’s worth keeping this shit in mind when someone talks about equality of opportunity, class warfare, and 9-9-9 tax plans that increase the tax burden on the poor and working class. Many of our Fellow American don’t have the luxury of forgetting it.