Honolulu Lite
Little Jessica Dubroff was killed when the Cessna she had foolishly been allowed to control crashed in Wyoming yesterday.
This makes me so angry. As the father of a daughter who just turned 8, I simply can't imagine what got into the jelly-brained skulls of Jessica's parents.
I know. Now really is the time for sympathy; sympathy for the mother and the surviving relatives (Jessica's father and her flight instructor also died in the crash). But I'll leave the sympathy for the people who knew Jessica's family. All I have room for now is anger.
As I read all of the stories on the wire about the crash, the line that bothered me the most was Jessica's father saying that trying to become the youngest person to fly across the country had been Jessica's idea.
He said Jessica "dragged her mother and me into this" and was not pushed by parental ambition.
If allowing your 7-year-old daughter to attempt to fly an airplane and sending a letter to President Clinton suggesting he take a ride with your daughter is not parental ambition, then I'm Amelia Earhart.
Parental ambition, fame, fortune, appearances on television talk shows, being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, movies of the week and having a book on the best-seller list are the ONLY reasons that this girl is dead.
We live in a time when quick fame, at any cost, is the ultimate goal of many. Just look at the number of people cashing in on the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Or the number of producers scrambling to be first out with a television movie about the Unabomber. Or the number of people willing to expose their twisted, perverted lives on sleazy television shows like Geraldo and Maury Povich.
SO is it surprising that an idiot father would risk his daughter's life in a flying stunt? After all, a 9-year-old had already flown across the country. Then an 8-year-old. Of course someone was willing to let a 7-year-old try it. And had Jessica succeeded, someone eventually would have strapped a toddler in diapers into the cockpit. And then a pregnant woman would have shown up on Sally Jessy Raphael claiming that she had just flown the Atlantic with her fetus at the controls.
For Jessica's parents to say that the child forced them to allow her to fly an airplane is bordering on criminal. This incident, to me, boils down to nothing more than child abuse.
The general tenet of being a parent is that the parent knows more than the child. The parents' job is to keep the child safe and teach it how to survive. When the child tries to do something unsafe, the parent is supposed to say "no."
It would seem fairly obvious that any parent not blinded by ambition, if asked by a 7-year-old to fly an airplane, would say "no."
I don't even let my daughter walk across a parking lot by herself. Two weeks ago, when she was still 7, she learned to ride her bike. As I watched her careen around the driveway, I was a nervous wreck.
But watching your child take small, measured steps with a limited amount of danger is part of allowing her to grow up. Allowing her to engage in a dangerous enterprise generally practiced by adults such as flying a plane is negligent. Had Jessica's father not been killed, he should have been jailed.
What will be the legacy of this sad incident? Certainly more government regulations. (As if we need the government to tell us that children should not attempt to fly airplanes).
Unfortunately, you can't legislate away stupidity.
