Recent tragic deaths of children in New York City have resulted in a massive pointing of fingers where? At the City. Not at the parents. Blame the poor social worker who is probably doing her best to juggle and salvage all of the hopelessly dysfunctional homes she has on her roster - as if anyone could, regardless of the numbers of social workers. Even one social worker per family couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together.
Is it realistic to expect a city government to be 100% effectively in loco parentis, with a population of 8 million? I don't think so. NYC has an enormous and very professional department of social services. And yet the press seems to approach it that way: anytime anything goes wrong in this world, it's a government failure. But these deaths are, in fact, not signs of government failure as much as they are signs of family failure.
Blaming government for everything that goes wrong in this world reveals a deeply dependent attitude towards government - it reveals the immature fantasy that government could make life nice and safe for everyone, if it only wanted to. As if it were a perfect parent, or God. But even God doesn't make everything nice and safe, does he?
I don't mean to be nihilistic here, and not hard-hearted - just realistic. Being alive is intrinsically risky: most years, 43,000 American adults die in cars, and 2500 kids. No matter what efforts are made, hurricanes will come, mines will cave in, people will get sick, planes and cars will crash, families will unravel, and bad people will do destructive things. (And trial lawyers will bring law suits, claiming that if we had crystal balls, the event could have been prevented.)
Stories of kid's deaths and murders are heart-breaking, especially when there are two-year waiting lists for adoption. If people can't handle kids, or life, the caring thing to do is to give the kids to someone who can, and who longs for the responsibility and the chance to give love and care and protection. Those are things that even a perfect government could not provide.
Gelinas at City Journal wrote about the deaths here: Why Didn't anybody save Nixmary?
