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Amber Alert whiners need to wake up their empathy

Late-night knocks at the door, phone calls during dinner and friends coming and going without notice at any time of day. When I was growing up, interruption was just a part of life.
amber alert

Late-night knocks at the door, phone calls during dinner and friends coming and going without notice at any time of day.

When I was growing up, interruption was just a part of life.

But today, even if it’s a life-or-death situation, people just don’t seem to want to be bugged - and it’s becoming a real problem.

Thanks to technology, we can now silence phone calls, ignore texts and complete transactions without having to talk to a live person. Playdates no longer exist without pre-determined plans and few families have home phones - making those old-school interruptions nearly obsolete.

While we’ve become comfortable with the controlled communications that have resulted from these changes to technology, it seems as though we’ve forgotten about the importance of spontaneity, face-to-face interactions and the unspoken rule of helping others.

On Feb. 14, an Amber Alert was issued across Ontario, notifying the public of the abduction of an 11-year-old girl in Toronto and pleading for the public’s help to locate the lost child. Unfortunately, the authorities were unable to save the girl in time, her body discovered deceased at her father’s home later that night.

The search ended with devastating results and a disappointing outpouring of complaints from the public. Many of these people felt compelled to call the police - not to help with the search, but to complain of the late-night interruption received through their devices.

In response to more than 300 complaints received as a result of the late-night wake-up call, media relations officer Const. Akhil Mooken of Ontario’s Peel Regional Police shared in a tweet, “I can’t even begin to describe how disappointing and upsetting it is to read the comments, emails and calls to our communications bureau complaining about receiving an Amber Alert late at night.”

Disgusted by the disregard for a system that literally saves lives, an outpouring of objections hit the headlines, calling out the whiners who seemed to be more worried about a good night’s sleep than the life of a missing child.

What kind of society have we become, if people are more concerned about being interrupted, than looking at an unexpected message that could potentially save a life?

Amber Alerts, a wireless emergency alert system designed to locate children who have been abducted, have saved 934 children (as of October 2018) through widespread messages shared through highway signs, TV station “text crawls,” and direct messages to the devices of those living in the affected areas. The immediate speed of the spread of the alert and the ability to cast a wider net when it comes to making the public aware of the missing child case are just some of the benefits. It’s a system that works.

The complaints about the Amber Alert notifications are an important wake-up call for us all that living uninterrupted lives, may not be worthwhile in the long run. While we may enjoy the comforts of closing ourselves off from interruption, we need to remember that sometimes a knock at the door, or an unexpected notification, may be a call for help that must be answered.

I say keep the alerts coming because if disrupting my sleep could potentially save a child’s life, it’s more than worth the interruption. No loss of sleep could compare to the devastation of the loss of a child.

Bianca Bujan is a mom of three, writer, editor, and marketing consultant. Find her Twitter and Instagram at @bitsofbee.