This has nothing to do with homeschooling, but nausea and apathy have pretty much killed my motivation to tackle the task I set before myself this evening…and that is only in part due to pregnancy.  Thanks to COD for this little article which displays both the worst and best of the human spirit:  The girl in the window.

The girl in the window is six year old Danielle, who just appeared there for a fleeting moment one day, years after a family moved in.  No one even knew a little girl lived there.  When officers finally arrived to investigate, what they found left them vomiting and in tears.

“I’ve been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad,” Holste said later. “There’s just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting.”

And then there was the little girl.  The one who had appeared for a fleeting moment in a window months previously.  Lying in a bed in a soiled diaper, amongst a stack of dirty diapers and surrounded by filth and human excrement.  At seven, she had been so severely neglected that she was completely unresponsive to stiumuli, including eye contact, touch and even pain.  No one knows whether she will ever be able to live on her own although physically, nothing is wrong with her.

In the end, she is adopted by a loving family who by all accounts is doing all they can for her even though she is far from what they were seeking when they set their hearts on adoption.  Her eyes just captivated them and the rest didn’t seem to matter so much.  She is even beginning to show improvment, responds to people, understands simple commands, is potty trained and seems to enjoy interaction…all things which no one knew for sure she would ever be capable of.

I should have just stopped reading the story at the end.  It was about as happy of an ending as you could get for a story like this.  But of course a comment caught my attention, and I think someone’s moral compass is in serious need of readjustment.  Dormiel writes:

Wait they are saying that the mother had a low IQ and was neglectful so they give her to a family who worship sky fairies? I don’t know what’s worse frankly.

Let me see.  Leave the child to rot in her own feces, or give her to a Christian family who wants to care for her.  Which do you think is worse?

I’d be inclined to pass it off as yet another asinine Internet comment, but I’ve heard others who seem to have difficulty drawing a distinction as well.

So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.  Edge.org

And Nicholas Humphrey is not some random anonymous commenter on a newspaper article.  He was speaking before Amnesty International.