milk carton face gone wrong

This weekend, I had WS Random and Little Sister over for dinner. The age difference between the two is about 14 year. So, when Little Sister was a small child, WS Random frequently was the primary caregiver when their mother was working or otherwise occupied. WS refers to Little Sister as "My _______________".

WS and Little Sister are very clearly siblings because they have very similar faces but different hair colors. WS and Little Sister come from a loving and affectionate family. Especially the siblings and the mother. Their family is also a shining example of clean living, good morals, and service to ones community.

I was telling them about how humans would be unsure as to how to respond to me when I was out of the lab. I talked of the rude, invasive questions, comments, and looks I became accustomed to while I was honing my "people skills." And Little Sister said that she was glad that someone else could relate. She went on to explain that throughout her life, people have questioned whether she was her mother's child. (The mother has brown hair and olive complexion. Little Sister has red hair and has a lighter complexion. Little Sister's father is of germanic background.) Little Sister related the many times absolute strangers would as her mother "are you sure she's your child?" She said the worst was when she and her mother were in a fabric store and the clerk stopped Little Sister and questioned her as if she were a kidnapped child. The clerk went so far as to ask Little Sister if she were safe and what was her "real" name.

I'm all for faces on milk cartons, bulletins at the post office, and amber alerts. However, I think we've taken the fear of children being snatched a bit to far when a single child faces repeated questions in this vein. The reality is that most snatched children are snatched by relatives. With older children, they are more and more likely to have been lured away by someone they think they know but their parents would be horrified to think their children were acquainted with in the first place. In a similar issue, I don't quite understand why adult humans have criminalized children who run away. I would think that it would make logical sense to look into the household that the child ran away from before deciding the child is the bad one off the bat.

Then again, I don't have any babies and no one asked for my opinion in the first place. People rarely ask my opinion. I guess they fear they won't like the reflection in the mirror I try to hold up. And, it has been my experience that humans rarely take perfectly good advice - even when they pay for that advice.