Rant on.

 

The latest viral video is something of an anti-bullying message.  If you haven’t seen it, it has one scrawny kid named Ritchard Gale verbally assaulting an overweight classmate, Casey Heynes.  Ritchard backs Casey up against a wall and punches him in the face.  Not a light slap, by the way, but a full-on punch.  Most adults would have trouble not reacting to punch in the face, but Casey did nothing.  Ritchard continued his verbal tirade–no apparent reason other than Casey’s weight problem–while trying to punch Casey more.  Casey mostly blocked the punches, but at least one solid strike to his gut got through.  Casey continued to take this for a few seconds after that punch, then finally he snaps, picks Ritchard up, and slams him to the ground.

 

Let me say right now I don’t like violence.  I also admire anyone who can turn the other cheek as Casey did at first.  But I also can’t fault him for finally taking action and doing what he did.  If the incident in the video was the only one between these two kids, Ritchard had that body slam coming to him.  He deserved it.  As the video went viral, however, and both became instant celebrities and it was learned Casey had been tortured for some time.  He considered suicide at one point.  The kids who bullied him once taped him to some kind of pole, putting duct tape over his eyes.  And yet, he did not lash out against Ritchard after he was punched.  His snapping and fighting back was long overdue, but he still held back at first.

 

Still, not everybody quite sees who was in the wrong here.  Ritchard’s mother, Tina, while not defending her son’s actions, feels Casey owes her son an apology.  She feels her son has been victimized by all the media attention, that her son did not deserve to be body-slammed (bullshit!) and wants Casey to apologize for the video being on the internet.  Except Casey had nothing to do with the video.  It was one of Ritchard’s friends, who all goaded the scrawny bully on, who took the video and uploaded it.

 

If there is something generally wrong with the world today, it is people who blame the victim.  A co-worker mentioned to me the other day a case somewhere in the middle east where a blind woman was raped.  According to my co-worker, her attackers got off but she got a number of lashes.  I did not find a specific case matching this circumstance, but I did find several similar cases where rape victims were given one-hundred to two-hundred lashes for being raped.  In several cases the rapers were convicted of their crimes as well.  In one case, the victim retracted her allegations to avoid the lashings, preferring to spend time in jail for lying to the court than be punished for being a victim.

 

This is not an attack on the middle east.  The above-mentioned cases are just extreme examples of the victim being punished for a crime committed against them.  Ritchard Gale’s mother is a demonstration of the attitude which leads to such things.  It’s time to start turning such attitudes around.  We need to look past our own biases and see the world for what it is.  Tina Gale stated she was shocked by her son’s behavior.  On some level, I think she had trouble accepting it as being real.  This allowed her to blame the victim of Ritchard’s behavior for what happened rather than her own flesh and blood.  I have known parents like this, people who think their kids are absolute angels who can do no wrong.  That’s not the way the world works; people are people and everyone is flawed.

 

Some day, we will accept our flaws and see the world with clearer eyes.  The world will be a better place.  At least, that’s my hope.

 

Rant off.