I am sure that by now, anyone with a basic connection to social media has seen the story of Harambe the gorilla. Fingers have been wagged, sides have been taken. Articles of all sorts have been released. I myself have perused these articles. Perhaps I am desensitized, but I have seen comments ranging from demands that the child be removed from the custody of his parents to lackadaisical shrugs of "the kid should have died, not the gorilla." I continue to read, despite these dark words that spell out the death of our collective commune.

Those of us who do not pretend at parental perfection have grouped to one side, and I am hopelessly biased in our favor. We cannot afford to be sanctimonious when the life of a child is at stake. If one person had paused in their judgement that day in Cincinnati, one person had grabbed that toddler, a magnificent specimen of why it is so important to conserve our species would not be dead, and an innocent family would not be facing criminal indictment.

And for what? The way the internet collectively acts, you would think that the mother of this child had dangled him over the gorilla enclosure or thrown him into it! A determined child did what determined children hell-bent on their tasks do -- he reached his goal, and his mother paid for it.

The death of the village starts when we crucify mothers on the cross of our own self-righteousness. We begin this dangerous dialogue of 'that could never happen to me' or 'she needed to watch her child,' as if every mother should never sleep, should stay ever-vigilant despite the very real reality that children wreck homes and break things and run five miles down the road (that's what it feels like) in the two seconds our eyes are elsewhere. This is how kids fall into enclosures and get left in chilled cars or 90 degree weather on accident, this mantra of "I am a better mother and this could not happen to me."

There are more insidious tones here -- the fact that the father of the boy was also at the zoo but was not mentioned for some time, as if the job of child-minding is solely the responsibility of the mother. And then, when it emerged that the family was African-American, his entire history was laid out as a way to incriminate him.

Now they face an investigation by police and by the zoo itself, as if the zoo is not to blame for 'securing' a 400lb animal behind what amounted to a bit of water and flimsy wire.

America has once more been divided by sanctimony and wagging fingers, ignoring completely the racist and sexist undertones of the story in its entirety. Instead of rallying around this family and saying 'I too have screwed up as a parent,' many of us have chosen to throw her to the proverbial wolves, citing "It Could Never Happen To Me"as our reason.

There is a last result of the village's death, and it is the fact that if this family loses their child to an unwarranted criminal investigation, don't you dare cry foul when the police come to take your children away for streaking into the driveway or running down the street, for slipping your hand and escaping into a crowd. If so many of you are so willing to trade and burn this woman's life to ash on the pyre of Better Motherhood, you had best be perfect the rest of your life, and may forgiveness never be shown you for a single misstep.