I was sitting at McDonalds, glancing up at Ketchup playing, and working on my laptop, when suddenly, all eyes turned to the top of the playset as a sudden shriek rang out. This was a small, young child’s wail, and you couldn’t block out the pain and fear in her cry. Her mother ran over in a panic. She had no clue that her little baby got up to the top, and wasn’t fully sure how she’d gotten there. In that moment, every other parent– and their children– sprang into action to get the young girl down.

The mother started to cry a bit, knowing her daughter was just so young, when her son came over and tugged at her shirt. “I’m so sorry, mommy. I took her up there but she was afraid to slide and now I can’t get her down.”

Parents scrambled, asking the mother for a description of her daughter, then sending their children up to look for her. We all listened for the cries. Preteens lept to their feet, climbing through the small tubes to find the girl. Within minutes, in a blur, the girl was down the slide, safely cradled in the arms of an older child, parents comforting the mother, children comforting the young girl, then reuniting the two.

Luckily, it was a pretty minor situation, but it was a very real sign of the dangers that can come when parents are distracted for a single second– a little boy, hoping to give his baby sister a bit of fun, carried her up and left her when she couldn’t come down. It was just something normal, but something that could have led to some serious injury had this young girl come down a tall slide on her own, or fallen down a tube looking for a way out.

But you know what? In that moment, I didn’t see a single parent or child rush to tell the mom that she should have been paying more attention. None of us believed the mother had done anything wrong, just as none of us believed the girl’s brother had done anything wrong.

This was a series of simple, human things. Any of our kids could have been that brother, any of us could have been that mom. I had been sitting on my laptop, for goodness’ sake. We’ve heard that it takes a village to raise a child, and at that moment, we were that village– maybe not in raising that little girl, but in helping lend a hand in that one small moment.

The incident didn’t end in tragedy. The little girl was safe, albeit a little bit shaken up, and everything was back to normal in a few minutes. But had it ended in tragedy, I can only imagine the headlines and hurtful words that would have been slung on social media– Where was this mom? What was she doing instead of watching her daughter? What kind of neglectful person, blah, blah, blah, we’ve heard it all before.

We heard it after Harambe the Gorilla was put down because of a child who had fallen in his cage. (By the way, people ruthlessly attacked the mother in the situation, asking why she wasn’t watching better. I never saw anyone attack the father, who was also there… what gives?). We heard it after a sweet little 2 year old was snatched by an alligator.

Heck, we hear it every day when we see the mommy wars cropping up on Facebook all over again– just yesterday, I saw a facebook screenshot of a woman looking for people to join an exclusive group. However, people could join only if they fit into specific ideas of parenting: extended breastfeeding, against routine infant circumcision, non vaccinating, babywearing, cloth diapering, organic clean eating (preferably vegan or vegetarian diets)… the list went on and on. To join, they had to fill out an online survey to make sure they were “suitable.”

But what was just as bad? I saw that post on a facebook page dedicated to bashing moms like that. They call them sanctimommies, laughing about how holier than thou they are. The page bashes these sanctimommies, making them no different than the very moms they dislike.

In our culture, we are so quick to judge others for what they’ve done wrong in parenting their kids. It wasn’t always like that, and my hope is that it won’t always be. My fear is that maybe in some ways it really has always been like that. The difference is that we no longer keep judgmental thoughts to ourselves. We’re given a broader, more anonymous outlet to trash parents. In a world of online petitions that just take a few strokes of the keyboard to feel like we’re bringing actual justice, of people giving their opinion, however warranted or unwarranted it is, and where you can just click “share” on someone else’s rant about someone’s parenting and it start to go viral, well, you can see where maybe we’re just seeing it more than we used to. We’re more open to putting it out there.

See, we’re no longer a society that looks out for one another, or one another’s children, at least not online. We see hateful words slung left and right, “where are the parents?” But in that one small moment at McDonalds, I saw a glimpse of what society used to be. People coming together without judgment to help find someone who needed help.

I think our heart is still there, y’all. I just think we’ve lost our path. We spend so much time telling others what they’re doing wrong, to the point we’re hurting society as a whole.