Shaming is easy; mourning is hard

Cindi Andrews is The Enquirer's opinion editor. The views expressed are her own.

When my daughter was about 18 months old, we met a friend of mine at a park and I let Katie toddle around while we chatted. I never took my eyes off Katie, but as she turned toward the street I suddenly realized that watching her wasn’t enough. I had misjudged the calculus of how far she was from me and how fast her chubby little legs could carry her in a rare moment when my cautious child decided to be adventurous. I kicked off my high heels and ran, yelling for her to stop. Of course, she thought it was a game and continued into the street. The driver of the car that stopped for her surely thought I was a terrible parent, and in that moment I was. I had made a potentially fatal mistake.

The death of Harambe, a western lowland gorilla killed Saturday after a child fell into his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, is a tragedy. The world prematurely lost a magnificent creature, a member of a species that’s among our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom. Anyone who has spent time at the zoo’s gorilla exhibit understands that they are imbued with intelligence and emotions not unlike our own, and it’s painful to think that human error caused Harambe’s death.

Quickly, the effort to pin the blame on someone – anyone – lit up social media. On the zoo, for the first-time failure of an exhibit design that’s been in place for 38 years. On our culture, for holding wild animals in captivity to begin with. On unnamed, theoretical bystanders who could have stopped the child from going through the barrier. A disturbing thread even emerged questioning the race of the family and whether that would impact public perception of the incident.

But mostly we have blamed the child’s parents.

With no information about the circumstances except that a 4-year-old boy squeezed through a barrier and then fell into a moat, people took to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere for a hearty round of “social media shaming.” Why weren’t they watching their child? They’re bad parents. Their child was injured and Harambe died because of them.

So many individual comments become a chorus of condemnation – a virtual mob. Forget the stages of grief. With social media, there’s no time or need for denial. We go straight to anger.

Confession No. 2: I was among those to comment, saying on a friend’s post: “Sad and angry. Didn't need to happen. People, watch your kids!”

As I calmed down, I remembered that moment in the park with Katie. And soon I saw a number of other parents on social media sharing their own confessions of that one time when … . Of course it didn’t need to happen, but that moment at the zoo is one the mother will suffer for the rest of her life. Raising a child to age 18 means maneuvering him or her safely through more than 567 million seconds, and it only takes one of those seconds for something to go terribly awry.

Assigning blame gives a false sense of having “solved” the tragedy: If X will only do Y, then no more gorillas need to die and I can feel better. It’s human nature, and to the extent that the focus of blame moves on from the family, it will probably shift to the zoo. How did the barrier fail and did they react correctly? It is unlikely that this story will fade from the headlines or social media soon. The zoo is one of our best-loved institutions, and the untimely death of an endangered gorilla puts Cincinnati in the national spotlight for the wrong reasons.

Amid the blame and social noise let’s pause to be thankful that the child is OK and to truly mourn the loss of another life, not so different from a human one. That doesn’t happen on a smartphone or a computer. It happens quietly, perhaps by remembering a past trip to the zoo or thinking about our relationship to the animal kingdom. Enquirer reporter Shauna Steigerwald’s story, “Who was Harambe?,” is a good place to start. It talks about the young gorilla’s intelligence and curiosity and using sticks and things to reach for items outside his grasp.

Let’s also remember in our thoughts and prayers those zoo workers who knew Harambe so much better than us, and had to witness or even have a hand in his death.

As a child wrote in a sympathy card left at the zoo: "We are so sad that you had to kill one of your gorillas we love the gorillas," Steigerwald reported.

In Harambe’s memory, let’s take a moment to let go of the anger and simply be sad.