Abby Sunderland, a 16-year-old girl whose parents thought it would be a good idea to allow her to attempt a global circumnavigation by sailboat, has been found floundering in heavy seas in the Indian Ocean without a mast. Perhaps her parents, Marianne and Laurence Sunderland, who have six other children, figured that with that many kids the risk was acceptable.
These days, sailing is largely automated, so even a girl can appear to be a heroic, swashbuckling sailor on the high seas. Comparing her attempt to much earlier circumnavigations would be something like comparing taking a turboprop to the South Pole to the Amundsen and Scott Antarctic expeditions. Nevertheless, Abby failed, probably because of some technical error (e.g. she sailed right into a heavy storm) or malfunction.
Although the girl’s pluck is admirable, her parents’ decision to support this trip was unfortunate. Sometimes, when equipment fails, you need muscle, something that 16-year-old girls don’t have in abundance. Hopefully, the massive rescue, which involved numerous boats and planes, will be paid for by the Sunderlands, so next time they’ll think twice about sending a kid off alone on the high seas.
The recent trend of having children break age records in extreme situations strikes me as a bit bizarre and unhealthy. Although some kids may succeed, a number will fail – some tragically – and unlike when adults attempt extreme feats, in their case there will be others to blame besides just themselves.
In my opinion, this is part of the infantile 1970s ideology, born of Marxist thought, that held that anyone can be or do anything they want if they only want it enough (ironically, people who lived in real Marxist countries were disabused of that notion before us, because it led to mass starvation due to idiotic production goals). Now that people who were indoctrinated by that as children are parents themselves, they are encouraging their children to act out their own childhood fantasies.
