

Personally, I think that’s the wrong approach. We’re very individualistic in the states and that leads to thinking that each child is the responsibility of their parent(s) and no one else, but if we had a more communal approach to raising children and acknowledged their wellbeing is a collective responsibility perhaps this could have been prevented. There’s a lot of personal dysfunction in this story, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that community can make up for.
We should have well funded and robust childcare services so that people who aren’t responsible enough to take care of children have something to lean on. In a sane society one person dropping the ball shouldn’t result in a child’s death. Does having a communal place where children are well cared for without the need for payment really defy the imagination? In a nation where we can’t even provide basic healthcare perhaps it defies expectation, but we will never achieve what we can’t imagine.
Doesn’t anyone find the recent uptick in articles about Islamic fundamentalist crimes odd? There are billions of people in the world and these sorts of things happen frequently, yet they rarely receive non-local news coverage. It seems to me like the media is capitalizing on rising Islamophobia (due to the escalating conflicts in the Middle East) by releasing sensational articles about Islamic extremism, which has the effect of drumming up more Islamophobic hate. When crimes like this are committed in the US by Christians the media tends to blame mental illness.