Four days ago we shared an image that has gone around the world generating a great controversy, that of a mother sitting in an airport seat and her baby lying on the floor, while she looks at the mobile phone.
An image that gives rise to many interpretations and that makes many people (and I include myself) have fallen into the trap of interpreting according to what is seen. And it is that the incredible thing about a photo is that it provides a lot of information and gives rise to many opinions, but at the same time it only provides an instant of an event that could be very different from the first thing that comes to mind.
Now finally we know what happened And we can explain why he left his baby on the floor to look at the mobile phone.
Molly Lensing's Story
They explain it in a newspaper in Brazil called Bhaz, where they say that the airline Delta Airlines is responsible for this and other events.
Apparently, a failure in the computer system caused several passengers to wait too long to fly. It was the case of Molly Lensing, a woman traveling alone with her baby. He was returning to visit his brother, in Colorado, and stayed waiting at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where he had to make a connection between flights to continue on his way home.
His first flight, the initial one, had to leave on Monday, but it was canceled. It was postponed to Tuesday, but left with a delay of six hours and Molly and her baby lost the flight they had to take in Atlanta. They told him that the next flight would leave at midnight, but it was also canceled.
It was until about four in the morning with his phone, trying to solve the problem with the airline. From Delta they told him that there was no possibility to spend the night in a hotel and that I would have to sleep at the airport with the baby. The next day some journalists interviewed several affected people, including Molly, who at that time was changing her baby's diaper, sitting on the floor. They had slept right there, lying on the floor of the airport, and that Wednesday morning, thinking that everything would be fixed, they informed him that his flight would leave the next day, Thursday.
Molly was tired, obviously, and when she found out she sat down to try to talk to her parents and see how they could do it. Maybe they could go find her by car or there was another way to prevent her and her daughter from having to spend another day at the airport, and another night on the ground, waiting for a plane that would start on Thursday, but that could be canceled again.
In that instant, someone took a picture of it and from there the whole stir began and what you already know, the world saying that a baby would never have to be on the floor (I was one of them and from here I apologize to Molly Lensing for my words) and many imagining what seemed worse and more obvious, than she had just arrived or at most she would have been there for a little while and that overwhelmed her baby left her on the floor so she could be calm saying anything inconsequential on the mobile.
And yet, he had been at the airport for more than a day, after sleeping on the floor, with his baby for less than three months: it was normal that he did not feel the need to take her in his arms immediately ... I had been there on the ground for hours, with her.
Who knows what
This lesson led me to a lesson, one that has been given to us a thousand times: do not fall into the error of judging by appearances; not everything is as you think it is; who knows what's behind that image. At a time when everything is going very fast, so much that many people are already dedicated to commenting on the news without reading its content (based only on the headline), the same thing happens with the images: we run the risk of passing sentence before having all the data.
Well, we may have to reflect on it and apply the advice: Be careful, not everything is as it seems.
