I want you to imagine you are a lifeguard. But I want you to imagine much more than that.
Imagine you have always dreamed of being a lifeguard. For as long as you can remember, that’s all you ever wanted to be. Now your dream has come true. You are a trained, credentialed, and gainfully employed lifeguard.
Now pretend that this particular day happens to be your first holiday from work. Since you love the water so much, you decide to have a picnic down by the river that runs through your community. All is pleasant as well…until you hear the muffled, choking scream of a drowning child.
What are you going to do?
You haven’t finished your lunch. It’s your day off. The river is not your responsibility. Of course, none of that matters to you. You are a lifeguard – lifeguard by training – a lifeguard by calling. Instinct and heart kicks in and, life all first-responders, you naturally run towards the danger when others run away.
You dive in and swim out. You pull the helpless drowning child to the bank where you immediately perform CPR. She revives. You receive immediate and deeply satisfying affirmation of your choice of professions. What you dreamed about for so long has paid rich dividends for both you and the child you saved. It doesn’t get any sweeter than that moment.
However, before you have much time to bask in the glory of it all, you hear the sounds of two children struggling to stay afloat in the same spot.
What are you going to do?
It’s still your day off. You haven’t fully regained your composure. It still isn’t your responsibility. And now there are two.
You put on your best professional self and jump back in. You’ve been trained to rescue two at a time, and you’re pleased to see you have remembered your training. After bringing both nearly dead children to shore, you do CPR on one, then the other. Checking periodically on the first victim, you keep this up until both new arrivals are breathing again on their own.
Exhausted, you aren’t sure what you hear next. Maybe because you are so tired, the sounds you are hearing can’t be real. But they are. You listen carefully. You make out the terrifying sounds of multiple victims. Once again instinct, and luckily a good dose of adrenaline, renews your strength. You quickly run to the water’s edge. Assessing the situation, as you were taught to do before diving into the unknown, you count six little heads bobbing up and down in the swift current.
What are you going to do?
The circumstances haven’t changed. It’s still your day off. You are not getting paid to rescue these victims. Besides three water-logged babes clinging desperately to your side, you are all alone. And now, the fact that you didn’t finish lunch is taking its toll.
What are you going to do?
You’e not been trained to rescue so many by yourself; and there are no resources anywhere in sight to aid you in the daunting task now before you. But even if there were, it wouldn’t matter much now. Because while you are standing there trying to decide on a plan, you see even more. Like a serial killer who takes sick pleasure in showing off the extent of his crimes, the river reveals to you even more of its casualties. In fact, it finally dawns on you that they must have been there all along, even as you leisurely enjoyed your day away. The roar that you thought was the sound of the river rushing by was the cries of countless children going down to an unthinkable fate. Guilt overwhelms you. But you have no time for that useless emotion.
For the first time today, you look upstream and to your horror all you can see are drowning and drowned children. Thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of flailing children and lifeless bodies are rapidly passing downstream.
What are you going to do?
Obviously you need help, lots of help. You also need lots of resources and a game plan, a good strategy. You must find a way to do the most good for the most kids in the most efficient way possible. But you can’t even grasp the extent of the problem! From your vantage point on the river’s edge, you cannot tell how far this awful, ugly river runs in both directions. It may be so full of hopeless children that you could spend your entire lifetime camped out next to it and barely touch the problem.
What are you going to do?
This river of social problems runs both deep and fast with multiple channels. New tributaries are constantly being added. Poverty, broken families, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, poor education, child abuse, neglect, and delinquency are just some of the currents flowing into this river. The tragic state of the modern child welfare system, once designed and built to save these children, is now a major contributor to the problem. Millions of vulnerable children are losing their struggle to keep their heads above water. A fallen and toxic culture is depriving them of a full and prosperous future, and in many cases, even of life itself. It’s going to take a well-conceived and dedicated effort on the part of many people to empty this murderous river.
What are we going to do?
There are many things we can do, more than we are currently doing. If we’re going to make any real and lasting difference, we need the helping hands of trained professionals and volunteers, of experts and of regular citizens. With so much at stake we dare not limit the pool of possible helpers.
We need folks specially trained in all kinds of areas – from healthcare to fundraising, from social work to social media. We need lots of folks who are willing and able to pitch in wherever they can. We need people and we need resources. We need safety nets, flotation devices, boats, warning signs, even fences, because we need to do prevention as well as treatment if we are to solve the problem.
We need to know much more than we already know about how these kids got into the river. We need to go upstream and investigate the situation. We also need to be confident that we know enough to get started. And we must hurry! This is a Code Blue emergency. Impatience in the service of vulnerable children is not a vice; it is a virtue. These precious little ones can’t afford to wait for us adults to figure it all out before we act. They need help NOW!
There needs to be a great deal of hard work, for sure. Although it isn’t really that difficult. Rescuing children and restoring the broken families and communities that discarded them into this dangerous river isn’t all that complex or complicated. Common sense can go a long way on this particular waterway. Unfortunately, however, common sense is a rare commodity these days, and that is largely the issue.
