goodandevil

The Evil | Picking Your Kids Up At the Bus Stop

As a bit of background, I don’t live anywhere posh but I’m certainly in a suburban neighborhood. The people here more or less own their homes or are well-to-do couples having children a little later in life. Everyone’s hurting on a relative scale, but in the absolute my subdivision’s citizens have farther to fall than many.

What’s more, while access to what you might want for Americana or just familiarity is miles away, we’re a mile or so removed from anything besides one main road and natural preserve. I certainly haven’t heard of nearby child predators on the local news.

So why pick up your kids from the bus stop in your car when you live right down the street? Obviously there are safety concerns, and playing the odds is never a good idea when it comes to protecting children, but then why is it that besides the waste in gas - and this was happening at four dollars a gallon, too — it feels so colossally blunderous as a decision to make?

I hope and pray that it has nothing to do with laziness, and if it was just one weird guy doing it out of obsessive compulsion, then you know what? It can slide, we’ve all got weirder eccentricities. When seven or eight parents are doing it simultaneously, blocking roads and interrupting traffic patterns, smelling the air up from idling and honking at each other once the first person gets impatient - well, let’s just say I lose my tolerance for what is not immediately obvious to my understanding.

Your house can literally be seen from the stop. If you’re the last line of defense, walk there yourself. Better yet, realize there are many far less safer places they’re going to be outside of your field of vision - school, for example - where they don’t have your protection and stop hanging on their neck. Some of these kids look fifteen. They’ll be driving themselves soon. They don’t need the kindergarten cop treatment.

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