On Monday, Aug. 5, a statewide Amber Alert was issued for 16-year-old Hannah Anderson and her 8-year-old brother Ethan Anderson when the body of their mother, Christina Anderson, was found inside the charred remains of their Lakeside home. Tragically, Ethan’s remains were later also identified within the ashes of the home. On Aug. 9, kidnapper James DiMaggio was sighted in the Idaho wilderness with Hannah by a man on horseback, and DiMaggio was shot to death the next day by an FBI agent. Thanks to the effectiveness of the statewide abduction alert system and the resulting awareness of the horseback rider, Hannah’s father is fortunate enough to have reunited with his daughter.
My deepest condolences go out to Hannah and her father. However, the focus of this story is not with the Anderson family nor the loathsome actions of DiMaggio, but rather my criticism of the alert system that resulted in his sighting.
The Amber Alert system began in 1996 when broadcasters and police from Dallas-Fort Worth collaborated to design a system to help find abducted youth. The system, standing for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response,” has since been incorporated into all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Canadian provinces and various Mexican border states. It has greatly contributed to the recovery of more than 600 children.
It is that last word, however, that makes me cringe—for not a single person over the age of 17 has ever been rescued by the Amber Alert system. Does nobody really care about adults? Compassion shouldn’t have a cut-off age. Much like how we have no control over our skin color, gender or sexuality, we have no control over when we fall out of our mothers and begin the slow decay of life. The Amber Alert system’s greatest warning is of an intrinsic social disease wherein if you’re old enough to smoke a cigarette, then your life isn’t worth saving.
Putting the phrase “abduction alert system” into a search browser bombards the screen with endless Amber Alerts, yet surely children aren’t the only people who risk abduction. What about slender women, effeminate men, old people or midgets? Are they not worth issuing out a two-sentence text? When I saw the age limit on the Amber Alert website, I couldn’t help but imagine the inaugural meeting with which the system was founded;
“So what about any abductees that are no longer minors?” asked Member #1. As a depraved grin ruptured across Member #2’s face, he hissed, “Let them die…”
But perhaps these principles stem from our inherent bias towards cuteness. For whatever reason it’s okay to boil a lobster alive in a fiery pot of death, but if I ate my neighbor’s puppy you’d probably be reading about it in some demonizing article inside next week’s issue. This lobster-puppy duality could very well be part of the same mass delusion that has us turning a blind eye to our nation’s abducted adults. Because I’ll bet that if children weren’t such glimmering beacons of laughter and joy, we probably wouldn’t be so biased toward saving them from deranged madmen with a propensity for flesh suits and Q Lazzarus songs. But no matter why it exists, this ageist ideology of our child-worshipping culture should be remembered by future generations with contempt.
So to those in charge of the Amber Alert system, I offer you a choice between two ultimatums. Either revise the criteria for issuing Amber Alerts into a nondiscriminatory abduction alert system for all ages, or be left in the dark when some crazed, overly-idealistic journalist asks you to help him walk a couch into the trunk of his van.
