When tragedy strikes, social media blames parents first

It doesn't matter where you live or what part of the political spectrum you fall on — sometimes, nothing feels better than a little self-righteous fury. 

On Thursday, Japanese soldiers discovered a boy left on a mountainside road 6 days earlier. The child was found safe, but local officials warned that he could have easily been devoured by bears. Just a few days before that, a toddler wandered into a gorilla cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. Zoo officials were forced to shoot the gorilla while the child was stuck between the animal's legs.

And while there were multiple parties responsible for each trauma, social media targeted their heartfelt rage on one particularly familiar group: the parents.

SEE ALSO: Animal rights activists react to gorilla killing after child fell into zoo enclosure

It's easy to see why. For the past week, hundreds of Japanese rescue workers have been combing the forest in search of the grotesquely adorable 7-year-old Yamato Tanooka. Yamato's parents had left him for several minutes on a mountainside road last Saturday after they caught their child throwing rocks at cars and people. The punishment was only supposed to be temporary — their initial plan was to leave him beside the road to scare him, and return a short while later.

But when the parents finally returned, it was too late. Yamato was gone, lost in a sparsely populated woods known for its very hungry bears. It would be almost a week before soldiers found him. And even though he was found safe — dehydrated and malnourished, but safe — the initial chances for his survival were slim.  

Image: youtube

All across the Internet, social media fingers were hard at work, busy tweeting, pointing, and feverishly wagging. 

"This isn’t discipline, it’s child abuse,” Kenichiro Mogi, a neurologist and media personality, wrote on Twitter on Monday. 

"If your children get on your nerves, don't worry, that's normal. What isn't normal is to abandon your child in a forest as a punishment," the Italian newspaper Viaggi News shared in an editorial.

"The parents are so stupid that I am speechless," another Twitter user wrote.

The word 'abandoned' appeared in multiple headlines, across legacy news outlets: CBS, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and yes, Mashable. This, even though the parents had never fully abandoned him — left him unattended for several minutes, even neglected him — but never seemingly planned to give up their custody.

Despite the extremism of their language, social media was (at least) partially correct. Yamato's parents are responsible for him, and they did leave him in a physically dangerous and emotionally unsafe situation. One of the greatest psychological threats a parent can direct at a child is that of abandonment — and Yamato's parents, well, made it.

Yamato's father made a videotaped apology to the public, who cast themselves as the victims in this situation, and social media responded the way any parent would. They either thanked them for their apology, or continued as before, as if they hadn't listened at all. 

Social media had done its favorite job: parenting the parents. 

Only a few days earlier, parents in Cincinnati Ohio faced a similar wrath when their child walked into a gorilla cage. A petition with close to 500,000 signatures called for child protective services to investigate Michelle Gregg, the child's mother. Here, the shaming seemed even more vitriolic, more disproportionate — perhaps because the tragedy hit closer to home. Social media users are more likely to identify with a parent who's distracted at a zoo than a parent who consciously leaves their child at the woods.

The closer the danger, the more familiar the details, the more likely we are to strike out. 

As culpable as the parents were, some of the web's rage felt unwarranted, compulsive, self-serving. Parents are expected to be stoic superhuman god-creatures, above feeling and rage and retribution. Think back to a time when either you as a parent, or your parents, made a similar error with lesser consequences. Spent too much time looking at your phone while your kids played unsupervised on a crowded playground. Lost your temper and said something spiteful, something you'll always regret. Sped away from the people you cared most about. 

Sure, none of this is to excuse what Yamato's parents did. Their actions, however familiar, unintentionally put their child at mortal risk. But the difference between Yamato's parents and most good parents is conceivably minor and probably luck. 

Just last year readers were put in similar situation, asked to pick sides in a fight that's honestly too embarrassing to type. In a small diner in Portland, Maine, parents found themselves unable to silence their toddler, who had waited close to 40 minutes for pancakes. The restaurant owner proceeded to kick the family out, a Facebook war ensued, and Americans everywhere were forced to choose sides in the one of the most meaningless battles of 2015.

Yet the rage directed at the parents of the toddler hungry for the pancakes and the boy lost in the woods in Japan was almost identical. Self-righteous fury hath no patience for context or nuance, no appetite for reflection or carbs. Nothing produces endorphins quite like a quick hit of righteousness. 

But that doesn't mean that we as readers and viewers can't act with more compassion. Instead of pointing fingers, raise hands to help. Hold actors accountable, and reflect on our own failures. Consider the nuances of the situation, or simply (the horror!) refuse to say anything at all.

Image: kyodo/ap

Asking social media to practice empathy is the definition of a losing battle. Still, as these incidents become more and more public, and our comments' sections longer and longer, it's worth attempting. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves stuck in the middle of a Facebook war, fighting with some third-rate relative about some second-rate zoo's right to bear arms. We may even end up defending our "real opinion" about pancakes standards in small city diners. Or tweeting hate at parents at like Yamato's, parents who display earnest grief and pain, parents we don't know and never will.

We'll abandon our good-enough parents, who deserve our censure as much as our compassion, on a lonely street in a dark woods — then leave it to them to find a way out.