Here’s a revoltin’ development. The father of California sailor girl, Abhy Sunderland, and the Australian government have caught some flack for the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent for rescue when her boat lost its mast in bad weather a long, long way from land. Some people wanted to know why a sixteen-year-old girl was out sailing around the world by herself in the first place when a lot of sixteen-year-old girls can’t even jog around the local park safely. Her father’s reply was something to the effect that kids today are over-protected.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20100617/00fe1425-8be1-4018-a694-338278951050
Okay. I’ll give you that sailing around the world is a more constructive activity for a teenager than prostitution or dealing drugs, but hey, wait a minute. I have to wonder a little bit about how many teenagers could get entertainment or job training or even food and cancer treatment for those hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for call-in isn’t a kind of over-protection, then I’ve got an oil spill I’d like you to finance. What planet does this guy live on?
There was a time when sailing was a little more essential for personal transportation, and that’s where the expectations of international assistance came from. If Abby got her start sailing as a cabin boy on the Cutty Sark, that might have been a little different culture, but I don’t think that happened. Even then, the only sixteen-year-olds out sailing around the world on their own were probably shipwrecked.
If Abby flipped burgers for the local fast food emporium until she was twenty-one to save up for her yacht, okay. I’d prefer that the Australians used their money for something more productive than intervening with predictably suicidal extremes, but we sort of make that allowance in the case of consenting adults, and I have no problem with sailing for fun and profit, but sailing is like horses and mountain climbing. As casual recreation and motivation for personal conditioning, they’re great, but the practical value is otherwise small in the real world, and heavy involvement with them is a kind of culture of the aristocracy. I’m okay with horses and sailing and climbing. I just have no use for aristocrats.
My personal opinion is that the youngest sailor or the youngest climber or the youngest rider to jump a Clydesdale over the Grand Canyon is just a couple of more jackasses in the world, their parents, and I’m talking extremes here, mind you. These are not accomplishments that inspire the human spirit to the height of achievement. These are accomplishments that point up the impossible gulf between the haves and the have-nots, a gulf that has not been bridged since the days of sailing ships, in spite of our great advances in engineering.
In fairness, of course, it wasn’t an issue until it went wrong. The young Australian who made the record also made a big splash in the press, most likely accounting for some of the Aussie inclination to sympathetic support, but, like Deepwater Horizon, that doesn’t mean the problem wasn’t there. The inevitable is also the nature of risk, but I’m inclined to say that if the California Dreamers want to sail around the world solo, let them wait until they hit twenty-one, or let them swim.
Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy
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