Hacker News Reader

Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

Why not ask his son, who has joined him on sections of his walk, or at least read the abundant press coverage about the two and why Bushby was unable to follow his infant son to Northern Ireland?

Within the overland-travel community, Bushby comes up often enough and people actually talk about his walk, getting visas, crossing borders, interacting with local people. It's a good demonstration of how toxic general social media like Reddit (or, now, HN) is for substantial discussion that people try to move the discussion instead to the personal merits of the person.

View on HN

As a retired cycle tourist myself who hosted a few world-spanning cyclists and a friend of a well known late Italian Vespa globetrotter, I would say: this is actually the critical audience (often subconsciously) personally justifying why their own life is so boring: "my way is the right way: everyone else is irresponsible". Deep down they feel threatened by the notion that their life may be boring BECAUSE OF THEIR OWN DAMN CHOICES. News at 9.

But yeah, they are all half-mad or worse (read: "interesting people"); military service isn't going to have zero impact either, people deal with it different ways.

I find it telling he doesn't have flags on his kit.

Many qualities of people who accomplish extraordinary things do not correlate with strong interpersonal relationships. The comment was a little overly judgmental so I totally understand your comments, but put politely, it isn't particularly unreasonable.

Absentee parenting is a novel concept; in ages prior it was the norm. That said, I'm on board with being there for the kids, all the evidence is positive. Unless you're English, in which case: chin up, keep calm and carry on! That's another contributing factor: the guy possibly went to boarding school.

Yes, a lot of things were the norm in "ages prior" that aren't considered great nowadays.

He couldn't go to Belfast because he was active duty in the British military.

But, he left the army to do his around the world walk, which means that he could have left the army and gone to Belfast instead.

He and his adult son have a good relationship now seemingly, but that doesn't mean his son didn't need a dad growing up. Having said that, it seems like this dude had a whole slew of mental issues, so perhaps it was for the best that he wasn't around his son much while he was growing up.

“Temporarily unable to go to Northern Ireland” doesn’t justify abandoning your child for the entire rest of his life.

There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

In so many of these stories, once the parent and child have publicly reconciled as Bushby and his son have, the child is very annoyed by total strangers on social media continuing to harp on abandonment or injustice; it feels like an intrusion into their personal life that hbn or smt88 knows nothing about. So, you might want to ask whether your intervention here is actually sought.

Reflects a lot better on the son than his selfish old man; he's fortunate he's seemingly turned out so well.

Well maybe public judgement of a father abandoning their child will stop it from happening to a child in the future.

I'm sorry, but: Post-hoc justification.

This entire discussion is post hoc, unless you're assuming that everyone who is commenting here happened to also have criticized him publicly in the past. There's no statute of limitations for people voicing their opinion on something they just learned about from a while back.

What?

The son forgiving his father doesn’t make him a good father.

Good fathers don’t need to reconcile in the first place.

I don’t know what your weird beef is here, but abandoning your son to do something incredibly pointless is selfish and terrible parenting.

"My weird beef" is hoping people will talk about Bushby's walk, which is legendary in overland travel circles and full of interesting details of local people, local customs, geography and geology, instead of trying to turn this into yet another social-media harangue of a person's personal flaws. What the man saw on his walk would probably be more interesting for a community of intellectual curiosity like HN (and look at dang's response above) than the man himself.

Sorry I don’t see it the same way. I don’t see a hero or admirable life’s work. He spent his life choosing himself over others.

Again, there is more to talk about than the man himself or his walk as his personal "life's work" . The regions he moved through, things like the Darien Gap in the early millennium, are often of great interest to the HN crowd, and these facts are discussed in the coverage of his walk.

> There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

I never understood why people are so willing to advertise their lack of imagination.

If you need “imagination” to prove that this guy was a good dad, he wasn’t a good dad.

What a ridiculous and childish snipe lol.

Then dazzle the discussion with your creativity.

No matter what, a kid needs his parents as a kid (in normal healthy families). There is not a case that I can imagine where not having them is good.

The fact that he gtew up to be a man much, much more mature than his father just shows he is the better person. And absolutely nothing on the father.

> [...] a kid needs his parents [...] There is not a case that I can imagine where not having them is good.

Now read your comment again, slowly.

Thank you for being condescending, this helps the conversation.

Could you please point out in the comment I was responding to where you found this quote?

And maybe refer to

>Why not ask his son, who has joined him on sections of his walk, or at least read the abundant press coverage about the two and why Bushby was unable to follow his infant son to Northern Ireland?

which true to explain how great the relationship was once the kid grew up?

The stories where bad parents just swoop in late in childhood and have a great relationship with their kids is frustrating. As a parent you would like to think the monumental task of raising a newborn from birth through the first 5 years would create some kind of lasting connection between you and your kid.

It is a ton of sacrifice and they won't recognize it until they have kids themselves. The reality is they can resent you as a teen and become endeared with a step or absent parent if they are more "fun" in the moment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com