Thursday, July 18, 2013

take on the 3:41AM alarm

It was 3:41 in the morning a few days ago whenI was awoken with the most horrifing noise I had ever heard.   The noise was excuciating and I immediately thought about an escape plan for me and my family.   After being awake for a few seconds, I realized the alarm was not coming from the smoke-alarm or our CO2 detector but from my IPhone..   
 
At a few minutes before 4AM, the NYC police department had sent out one of those Amber Alerts about a missing toddler to every person within about a 100 miles of the city.  Obviously, as a father of two young girls, I could see how this is helpful, but what really got me was why out of all the missing children that dissappear every year, this was the first one I've ever gotten. I checked the AmberAlert website and found out that, just today, there had been a thirteen year old who had gone missing.  As you can imagine there had been no notice sent out and it seems to be considered a police matter.
 
The difference here, was probably one of P.Y.A, or protecting your ass.   In the 3:41AM case, a mother with psychological problems, took her baby from a human services center without permission.  It doesn't take much to read between the lines here, but what this means is that somebody f*cked up, somebody let her walk out with the kid and now they were sweating.     I am convinced to that fear of the gigantic lawsuit the city was about to face, got the NYPD to blast the alert to 20 million sleeping people..
 
I get that this is a good cause, but to wake an entire city in the middle of the night for one kid,while hundreds of others go unnoticed, seems a bit arbitrary.  
 
 
 

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