Yesterday I was waiting for a bus. I like Alameda because it has a small-town feeling. Graffiti is still present, but I don't get the feeling I've stumbled onto a location set for a rap video, as I did when I was living in Oakland.
A young mother was seated inside the shelter, waiting for the bus. I greeted her, "Happy New Year!" and she smiled and said "Happy New Year." From her accent, I guessed she was far from the place of her birth, somewhere in Mexico or Central America. [I mention the ethnic difference not to be a bigot; I have scolded white parents on a field trip when the charges were fooling around less than 6 inches from the edge of the BART platform.)
Her two girls, 4 and 6, were close by playing on the handicap railings. I caught the mother's eyes and nodded towards the daughters. She smiled, but didn't look. She could hear them. She didn't have anything to read and didn't wear a Bluetooth, but was content her children were safe.
I wasn't. They were hanging off the railings. The older one, the one in the pink hooded jacket, was hanging from her arms and legs, at least two feet off the concrete. The younger one was hanging from a nearby railing holding on with her arms, but with her knees bent. "Be careful!" I said in a cheerful voice.
The mother glanced over, noted that I was at least three feet away from her daughters, then turned away, unconcerned with the possibility of injury. She was only concerned about me. Once satisfied I wasn't going to abscond with her daughters, she turned back, blissfully unaware that her two daughters were risking injury by hanging upside down on a handicapped railing with nothing but unpadded, bare cancrete below.
A couple of minutes went by, and she did nothing to call them to sit with her or at the least, not use the railings as playground equipment. So I said, "Be careful," in a soft voice, with less smile in my voice, but still polite. As a taxpayer in the State of California and the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the regions with the highest per capita concentration of personal injury lawyers in the world, I was concerned that the mother's neglect would lead to a 5-figure settlement which I and my fellow taxpayers would be forced to pay in return for her obvious neglect.
I wasn't thinking. Did the children understand English? They didn't respond to my polite -- and I must emphasize polite -- pleas to have them not behave recklessly.
On reflection, I should have taken out my mobile and snapped some pictures of them, with mother not paying attention. Or maybe I should have used a more menacing look. I was very careful to keep a smile in my eyes.
Instead, I tried once again. "Please, please, be careful." Finally the mother paid attention. Instead of cautioning her children to not behave recklessly, she scolded me. "...my children." I didn't understand the rest. Her face told me she wasn't concerned at all with the safety and health of her children; she was more concerned that this meddler was trying to give her parenting lessons.
Your call: Bigot, jerk, or concerned taxpayer?
