Sparks

By now you have heard the story: a couple of Californians had a gender reveal party. It's the thing now. But instead of slicing into a blue or pink cake or tossing out colored confetti, they took the reveal device into a field of dry four-foot tall grasses and let it go. If they had planned to set a gigantic fire, they could not have chosen better conditions: the day featured triple-digit temperatures, low humidity, dry vegetation and a stiff breeze.

They had their other children along, and someone with a cell phone to record the event (a video which will be played in courtrooms soon). The fire started at once, of course, and spread "like wildfire" as the couple ran back to their vehicle to get water bottles to try to put it out. The fire in the San Bernardino National Forest was labeled the El Dorado Fire. Beside the loss of property and destruction of the land, the awful, awful thing is that a firefighter was killed while working at the scene, the U.S. Forest Service said in a statement.

Capt. Bennet Milloy of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said, "You can’t fight a fire like this with a water bottle. They had no chance after it started. It’s a pretty tragic situation. Obviously this was supposed to be a happy event.”

I'm not writing this to decry the use of pyrotechnics at gender reveal parties; of course I am opposed to such a practice, but my opposition and yours won't mean a thing to the gozzleheads who do these things without a second thought.

That's my issue. The second thought. I wonder. How does it feel to be the couple who, through their own sheer selfish indifference, caused this ineffable agony? Do they spend the rest of their lives in penitence and sorrow? Will they feel awful pangs every time they think of the day they told the world that their as yet unborn child is a whatever gender, and in so doing, despoiled nature of thousands of acres of beauty, and, incalculably worse, deprived the world of a human being who had friends and family and a future with them? 

The officials in California saw the couple, as yet unidentified, has been forthcoming and cooperative. They may face charges up to manslaughter; all that is being determined by prosecutors.

I don't know how anyone can live with that sort of grief and guilt. I know what their attorneys will say in court, if it gets that far. "My clients, in an attempt to bring a little joy into the world, and share their glee over the impending birth of their young one, made a simple error of judgement..."

And you wanna know the crazy thing? That is true. No one is about to say they intended for this to be the outcome. 

But, as many people wiser than I have said before, it's the result that matters. 

I hope this couple gets the counseling they will need to deal with the guilt. I don't see that incarcerating them will serve a useful purpose. Others will keep up this stupid game of Light My Fire until it goes out of style. Perhaps these two can speak out in public about the dangers of sparking fires in tinderbox conditions.

Perhaps someone will listen.