dreadedcandiru2 | On unaccompanied minors in the Foobisphere

I remember once having written a blog entry that assumed that the Pattersons' love of having small children wandering around unescorted was an artefact of the Declining Years, a symptom of Lynn’s having lost touch with how parents behave. Sadly, the New-ruins have cured me of this belief. We’ve, after all, seen a lot of reprints that depict the same insouciant disregard of the boring fact of where the children are. The strip that appeared on 6 December 2009, wherein Elly used a movie theatre as a baby sitter, was simply the latest example of this annoying, distasteful and dangerous trend. There are, after all, a lot of impressionable people out there who, for reasons unknown, regard the strip as some sort of parenting manual so they might actually regard this as being the harmless sort of behavior Lynn wants to think it is; since we live in a world of Amber alerts and Megan’s laws, this is, to put it mildly, a catastrophically bad idea. When I look at Mike and Lawrence cheering on Blaster Man, I can’t help but wonder what sort of real-life bad guy might lie in wait for them and the rest of the audience because I have a brain, a brain that remembers a boy named Adam Walsh. I also remember the law; Elly simply cannot use public places like cinemaplexes, malls and the like to baby-sit her children for her while she goes off and does whatever; to do so invites charges under the Criminal Code of Canada as well as public censure. What really disgusts me about the whole thing is not only that Elly doesn’t seem to think that bad things can happen when she's not looking, a belief that never went away even after John had to fish a frightened child out of a freezing river, but that she seems to think that she’s too important to have to actually supervise her children. Since she adds hateful immaturity to her nauseating and raging narcissism, asking her to do her duty elicits moping as if doing what she must is doing her children a huge favor which will require that she own their horses later on in life.