Fame at any cost?

Rutland (Vermont) Herald: Much of the world held its breath recently as the fate of a 16-year-old California girl bobbed in the balance. Abby Sunderland was attempting to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly and without direct assistance when she went missing in the Southern Ocean, about halfway between Madagascar and Australia, a few hundred miles north of the Antarctic ice.

She was following in the wakes of her brother, Zac, who had held the record briefly, and Jessica Watson, 16, an Australian who just finished the circuit just weeks ago, taking the record.

It’s a record that will officially not be broken, as sanctioning bodies have agreed not to track categories by age.

Predictable calamity

Instead, after a predictable calamity in a storm typical of that season in that part of the oceans, Abby needed an over-flight from an Australian rescue crew and to be plucked from her boat by a fishing crew sailing four days’ round trip out of its way.

Those costs are beside the point when a young life is at stake; the problem is that young person’s parents should not have let her get into the pickle in the first place.