Sick to the back teeth of socially acceptable discrimination!
I WENT ON A BUS YESTERDAY AND THERE WAS THIS RETARDED GUY WHO KEPT GROANING REALLY LOUDLY. NOT SURE WHY THEY LET PEOPLE LIKE THAT ON :/
The above is quite a vile and shocking statement, no?
Where did the statement come from, and why am I posting it here? Well the where is simple. I said it, on my twitter, about 45 minutes or so ago. The why however will need more explaining.
No before I carry on, I want to make it crystal clear that I don't mean what I wrote, or agree with it's sentiments, in fact while I was writing it I actually felt physically repulsed at myself, even though I know I don't mean it. It's just... wrong on every level.
So why then? Well it's a sentence that I have read before, a number of times, from people on my twitter, with only two small amendments. Change the word "retard" for something along the lines of "scroat's Vaginal droppings" "chav's filth spawn" or even a more socially acceptable "child". Then change the word "groaning" with "crying" "screaming" or "tantruming". Do that and you now have something which seems to crop up on a daily basis on my twitter feed and to a lesser extent, here on Livejournal.
Understandably and quite rightly I have had a fair few replies on twitter denouncing the tweet. They have been quite nicely worded as well. I guess because people are either thinking that it's not like me to say, or they are worried that they misread it because it's so out of left field. Thanks guys for keeping faith in me and having diplomatic tongues. Not one of my twitter followers agreed with the tweet.
However when we change the sentance to the oft posted one about children, usually there's a couple or more replies along the lines of "I totally agree" or "I know, I had a similar experience and it's awful"
Why? Well maybe someone will comment below and redirect me to a Wiki page of logical fallacies or something, arguing that it's totally different. The question is why. The "retard" or person with obvious special needs/mental dissabilities is someone who cannot control their actions. Someone who relies on someone else to live their life, they are someone who has an annoying trait in that they groan loudly and they also have a need to get around. All the traits of a child in a similar scenario. The fact is that the two scenarios are very comparable, but the reactions are very different.
So the point? Well the point is I'm sick to the back teeth of hearing discriminatory statements towards parents and young children, almost as much as I'm sick of how ok this apparently is. It's actually offensive and upsetting to me as a parent to read that a noisy child shouldn't be allowed to use public transport and is something that should be kept away because it annoys someone. I don't like it and I hope maybe if you've made a similar statement or had similar feelings in the past, this will go someway to make you realise that it's not ok to treat children like a lesser human or to suggest that they should be kept away from you.
Thank you for listening.