I’d quite like the rain to stop now. Enough already. Of course, as soon as it does stop, the local authorities will be ready to issue hosepipe bans come 1st June. Typical, eh?
Anyway, I didn’t come here to chat rain. To be honest, I didn’t know what to write about today until I took Nell for a walk and witnessed an event that tugged at my heart strings.
We were trotting around a park, as you do. I was thinking about what to cook for dinner, Nell was after squirrels and pigeons. Not for dinner, mind - she’ll have her nutritionally balanced kibble and jolly well like it. But she was on high squirrel alert. Just in case. Anyway, we were following a group of people which consisted of two adult women and two girls, who I guessed were around 9 or 10 years old.
One of the girls ran off the pathway onto the grass, well mud because of all the rain, and she slipped. Not badly, but enough that she put her hands out to break her fall, and, of course, ended up with muddy hands, knees and elbows.
And she was clearly upset by this accident.
And what did her mother do? Her mother laughed at her. Not just a little titter followed by an ‘Oops, are you okay, let’s find the loos and get you cleaned up’ kind of response, but a throwing her head back uproarious laugh that half the park could hear. And this upset the girl even more. The tears and fury on her face that were caused by being laughed at by an adult who found the whole falling over in mud thing hilarious entertainment brought a lump to my throat. The girl ran off down the path, shouting that it wasn’t fair that they were all laughing at her and that she hated them all and they were to go away and leave her alone. My instinct was to go after her, with happy bouncy Nell, tip her a little empathic smile, let her know that I knew exactly how she felt and ask her if she was okay. But, of course, you daren’t do anything like that these days. More’s the pity.
Now, I think it’s great if people can learn to laugh at themselves.And most of us reach adulthood able to do so. But sometimes, especially young and maybe insecure or anxious children, just can’t. Children who take life seriously, children who have the urge to be perfect or who are natural people pleasers. Or children who feel a psychological pain when humiliated or are laughed at by others as the butt of some sort of joke. I know what it’s like, because I was such a child.
I still don’t like practical jokes. I think it is both unkind and unfunny to make fun of other people when, for example, they trip over or make a mistake. I think it is vile behaviour to deliberately set someone up ‘for a laugh’ and take pleasure in their discomfort or humiliation. It makes me livid when the perpetrator of a practical joke excuses their behaviour by trotting out the pathetic excuse of ‘I was only having a laugh. It was just a bit of banter.’ No, it means you are a bully.
And I think parents who behave like that mother in the park did when her child fell over and was clearly distressed at being laughed at because she got mud all over herself are shallow-minded, intellectually challenged, emotional f*cktards. Please excuse my language, but I feel real anger thinking about what I saw today, because it has reminded me of other examples I’ve witnessed over the years. Of children being the butt of adult jokes, adults who they should be able to trust to take care of them and not regard them as stooges for their pathetic so-called ‘humour.’
It was one of those occasions that makes me feel both hatred and sadness towards the human race and just how downright nasty it can be.
I have, occasionally, challenged this kind of adult in defence of a child. I’ve been laughed at for doing so, been asked what’s wrong with me, don’t I have no sense of humour? Oh, I have a sense of humour alright.
A kind and decent one.
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