Why Just Accept Our Tainted Lot?
I had to leave Los Angeles to discover smog.
Brown air never bothered me - indeed, I seldom noticed it - during the 34 years I lived there. But the first time I went back after relocating to Miami, the stuff nearly killed me. Watery eyes, burning lungs, the whole bit.
Take it as an object lesson in the adaptability of human beings, illustration of our power to shape our lives around inconvenience, find happiness in the crack between vexations. That’s also the wisdom to be taken from the tale of the Dane and the stroller, a story that has people saying “tsk tsk” on both sides of the Atlantic.
In case you haven’t heard it, the tale goes like this: Danish woman walks into New York restaurant leaving her child, a 14-month-old girl, in a stroller on the sidewalk outside. Worried patrons urge the woman to bring the baby in, fearing both the evening chill and the predatory human beasts that thrive in this country like maggots in a garbage can. Mom, monitoring her daughter through the restaurant window, shoos the worriers away, insisting all is well. Someone finally calls police, who arrest the mom - and dad, whom she’d joined at the restaurant. They are jailed for two nights, the baby put into foster care. The whole thing is currently working its way through the courts.
On this side of the world, it plays like a case of amazing naivete. We wonder, how can anyone leave a baby unattended in the biggest, baddest city of all?
But in Denmark, they see it as a case of incredible overreaction. They wonder, how can anyone take a woman’s baby away for such a trifle? Danish mothers leave their children outside all the time, thank you very much.
The Danes think we’re nuts.
And I find myself caught between the mores of two unalike societies. On the one hand, you want to shake the woman hard and say to her what Fiddler did to Kunta Kinte: “You in AMERICA now, dummy!” On the other hand, you find yourself quietly amazed at the inadvertent reminder that there remain places in this world where people walk without fear.
Denmark is a tiny Scandinavian country about half the size of Maine. The population is 5.2 million, the capital, Copenhagen, the monetary unit, the krone. Crime? According to reports, hardly any. At least, not by U.S. standards.
As a result, the Danes are untutored in the sort of horrors we’ve come to take for granted. Ultimately, though, that says less about them than it does about us.
Like smog, fear is something we’ve learned to live with. Indeed, not even to notice it until circumstances like these make us step back and see our lives from someone else’s perspective. And the sight is sobering: your own jaded eyes staring back at you, all the little compromises and concessions you’ve had to make, grinning in your face.
It’s amazing, this resilience we have, this ability to adapt. But it has a downside, doesn’t it? When we come to take constant threat for granted, to accept it as status quo, we can forget to imagine better things. We can forget that it is not like this everywhere and, indeed, need not be like this even here.
Instead we look at a woman who walks through the city without fear and think there’s something wrong with her.
I keep trying to see all this through her eyes, keep trying to imagine a place where danger is not a constant running buddy, where it might seem perfectly natural to leave your baby outside on the sidewalk. I find that I can’t. It comes back like a fairytale, like some sugary confection to be enjoyed but never remotely believed. And knowing that it’s nevertheless real only adds barbs to the unavoidable question:
Why isn’t that us?
Maybe the Danes are right. Maybe we’re the crazy ones.
xxxx