In a development so absurd it could only have been conjured by a fevered bureaucrat’s spreadsheet, America’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has found himself at the centre of a false police alert regarding the separation of his children. Let us pause to note that the Buttigieg offspring, twins born via surrogacy, are not, in fact, separating. They are two. They are infants. The only thing being separated here is the last shreds of sense from the American news cycle.
The alert, issued by some algorithmic imbecile in a local sheriff’s office, screamed that the Buttigieg children had been ‘separated’ in a security incident. This, of course, sent the Twitterati into a frothing lather, with half of them demanding answers and the other half demanding the children be returned to their rightful owners, presumably a pod of dolphins raised by wolves.
But here’s the real punchline, the one that will have you choking on your morning tea. When Britons hear about a false police alert regarding child separation, they do not think of conspiracy; they think of our own rather sensible child safety laws. You see, in the United Kingdom, we have this quaint notion that children should not be separated from their parents by police unless there is, say, a fire, a flood, or a rampaging badger. Our police alerts are not triggered by the digital equivalent of a sneeze. They are triaged by actual humans who have presumably not been raised by those aforementioned wolves.
Let us compare. In America, a false alarm about a cabinet member’s children sparks a national panic, cable news segments, and a statement from the White House press secretary. In Britain, such an alert would be met with a collective shrug and a query about the state of the nation’s gin supply. Our laws, you see, are not perfect, but they do not treat every child as a potential hostage in a political theatre production.
Buttigieg, to his credit, responded with the calm of a man who has faced far worse than a phantom police alert. He tweeted something, no doubt, about infrastructure and the importance of data integrity. The journalist in me wants to imagine he was also thinking: ‘I have twins, they are not separating, kindly direct your panic towards something real, like the crumbling roads I am supposed to be fixing.’
Meanwhile, the story serves as a grotesque mirror to the actual ongoing horror of child separations at the US-Mexico border. That, of course, is not a false alarm; that is a policy choice, one that has left thousands of families shattered. But do we talk about that? No. We talk about the false alarm involving a white, wealthy, same-sex couple’s children. Because of course we do.
So here is the truth, dear reader: the Buttigieg children are fine. They are probably sleeping, or drooling, or plotting world domination in the way that all babies do. The false alert was a glitch, a bug in the system, a bit of digital chicanery. But the comparison with UK child safety laws is not just about alerts; it is about a mindset. A mindset that says children are not political footballs. A mindset that says a false alarm is just that, and not a cue for a national meltdown.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have a date with a bottle of Gordon’s. The world, it seems, is still spinning off its axis, and I need something to hold on to.
