Death by hyperthermia

The link is to a Washington Post article about the phenomenon of otherwise good parents absentmindedly leaving their small children in cars to bake to death. It's not a pleasant read, but I think it's an important one. It's maybe a little easier for me than for most because I've long since accepted that I have an necessarily imperfect knowledge of who I am and what I'm capable of. I'm okay with not being able to know that I'll never be the sort of broken human being that small minds characterize as a monster. I know that's necessarily a fight waged and won over a lifetime, moment by moment. I don't think, looking at a case like Miles Harrison's, that he's a monster. I think he's unlucky, and I hope to never really understand the horror of what he goes through.

The article's discussion of a cheap, easily produced, unmarketable safety system is a clear snapshot of the kind of moral good that only a central government can accomplish, even if it hasn't accomplished it yet. People are too scared to face their own frailty, and they put lives other than their own at risk in refusing to accept their own weakness.

The Post article remains interesting over its entire length, and all of the characters in it are worth reading about. The most scarring -- and the most heartening -- is the story of Lyn Balfour, and I don't want to spoil it.

I ran into the article because it was linked by political blogger Matt Yglesias here, although he's mostly interested in the question of whether it's a crime. I think that's a very interesting question, but it's also the least interesting part of the article.