(Okay let me preface this rant with the note that this article is from the HuffPost so I cannot give it 100% veracity, but it feels solid enough so I am going to run with it.)
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| Sue me, I like cats and it seemed appropriate. |
So the gist of this article is a Mom takes her kids to Wal-Mart (First mistake right there.) and the boy child happens to be wearing a bright pink headband. Kid is two years old and wanted to keep rocking his Mom's headband and the Mom saw no problem with it. Some big burly pile of excrement disguised as a Man comes up and yanks the headband off. He then smacks the little boy on the side of the head and says "You'll thank me for that later." When the Mother justifiably gets upset, the man walks off calling the kid a very bad name and implies that someone is going to shoot the kid later on in life. (I am assuming that a boy wearing pink is a shooting offense in that area.)
Now two things really, really bother me. (Okay three, but we will do the third one last. The fact that a very large man physically assaulted a two year old child in front of dozens of witnesses and no one raised a single digit or voice to object to it. (This was Wally World, there couldn't have been more than two lanes open so lots of people had to be standing around.) It is a truly fugged up world when a bunch of so called adults just stand around and watch a child be accosted by a complete stranger. I can promise you that if I or most of my friends had witnessed this, things would have been a lot more (ahem) confrontational.
Have we really and truly reached such a low in our humanity that we can just stand and watch as someone hurts a child and not speak out? Sure, it wasn't the other peoples kid, but do people really care so little these days that they are willing to stand by and do nothing? I like to think otherwise but so many things seem desperate to prove me wrong.
Secondly, WTF is wrong with a little boy wearing pink? Or wearing something with flowers on it? Everyone seems to think that these petty little concepts of masculinity and femininity are etched in billion year old stone and are unchangeable. Boys were bright primary colors and girls wear pinks and pastels (Course tell that to Wonder Woman who has been rocking those colors since the 1940's) If a Boy wears pink he is a homosexual and if a girl wears Red she is a lesbian. That seems to be the general mentality.
Well folks, coming from a Nationality where men have been rocking the skirt for a very long time with absolutely no one questioning their masculinity, I can promise you that all of these tiny minded ideas of what boys should wear and what girls should wear are not only a fairly new concept, but are most certainly not universal. The concept that what someone wears define what they are is as moronic as the concept of how someone dresses causes sexual assault. The sooner people learn this, the better off we all will be.
In the end, this is about a grown man who felt he needed to attack a small child because the child offended his sense of masculinity. Instead of simply walking away or even politely expressing his opinion to the child's mother, he physically assaulted the child and then insulted him and expressed a not so veiled threat. Beyond anything else, this is the crime that was committed here.
There is no excuse or reasoning that can justify what happened. There can never be a reason for an adult to do what this man did. There is also no excuse for the people who stood by and did nothing while the child was assaulted. I pray that there will never come a time when good people stand by and do nothing. That more than anything is my own worse nightmare.
End of Rant
Postscript: As I mentioned earlier, I do have a 3rd objection to this article and it resides in the numerous comments describing the Man as a "Red Neck" as if all Red Necks are ignorant and violent people who enjoy assaulting people and children. As a Red Neck myself and having dozens of friends and Family that are also proudly Red Necks, I can assure you that most of us would have been the first ones in this Asshole's face the second he laid a hand on this child. This man was an ignorant, homophobic asshole. That is all that needs to be said about him.
As a redneck myself, I say that bastard would be on the ground less than a second after this happened. Bullet holes in him at his option.
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