A Union County social worker was one of two adults charged with intentional child abuse Friday after deputies found a child handcuffed to a porch with a dead chicken around his neck.
I devote a fair amount of time to looking for things that grab my interest enough that I’d want to write about them. Then there are the things I come across purely by chance that stop me dead in my tracks when try to wrap my head around something that defies rational explanation. That’s kinda the way I felt when I ran across this story. I found myself experiencing a horrible fascination (and revulsion) over the idea of “a child handcuffed to a porch with a dead chicken around his neck.”
It might even be something approaching humorous if not for the obvious child abuse. This being North Carolina we’re talking about, I suppose it’s not particularly surprising that this story also involves several large attack dogs and adoptive parents who had no business being allowed anywhere near children. The only things missing were a trailer, a case of Coors Light, and a .12-gauge shotgun.
How is it that Wanda Sue Larson and Dorian Lee Harper were allowed within 500 feet of a child, much less entrusted with the adoption of four and the fostering of a fifth? These two monsters have as much business being parents as I do being in charge of our nuclear weapons program. Why is it that one needs a license to own a business, drive a car, hunt, fish, and any number of other everyday undertakings…but anyone with functional plumbing or the desire to adopt can become parents? And why is parenting, arguably the most important job in the world, the one with the least amount of training and vetting? We say we love our children, and yet we entrust our most vulnerable to criminals, monsters, and deviants who could care less about their children and know even less about parenting.
Awesome.
And we wonder why our prisons are so full….
