I have a lot of sympathy for Kimberley Jones. You haven’t heard of her? Almost certainly, you have heard of her son, 11-year-old Keaton Jones.
The Facebook post of Keaton, crying in the seat of his mother’s car as she brought him home from school has now had 20 million views, and been featured on newscasts around the world.
A tearful Keaton asked why kids wanted to bully, why they picked on innocent kids, why they poured milk on him. “It’s not okay,” he told his mother’s cell phone. “It’s not their fault they’re different.”
Celebrities tweeted messages of encouragement. They invited Keaton to join them at shows, at ball games, at movie openings.
A man with no connection to the family opened a GoFundMe site. It raised $58,000 – before anyone even asked the Jones family if they needed financial help. Or if they would accept it.
Attacks on the messenger
And then the backlash started. Someone found pictures of Kimberley Jones standing by a Confederate flag. Someone else unearthed tweets that sounded intolerant of black activists, including Colin Kaepernick, the football star who started the protest of kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games.
Emails to, and about, Kimberly Jones got increasingly vicious. She was accused of exploiting her son, for her own presumably nefarious – but undefined – purposes.
I sympathize with her, because I too had a son who suffered from teasing. And perhaps some bullying. He was born with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, hereditary, and at the time terminal illness.
Briefly, cystic fibrosis harms the ability of lung cells to expel the mucus that keeps everything moist in there. The mucus accumulates, blocks tiny air passages, reduces the efficiency of the lungs, and eventually kills them. The cystic fibrosis gene also affects digestion, limiting the body’s ability to absorb nutrition.
As a result, our son was exceptionally skinny. And coughed constantly.
And let’s face it, kids can be cruel. Every human, in a sense, replicates the billion-year history of evolution. We progress from a single undifferentiated cell to an adult homo sapiens. As children grow, they pass through that primitive stage of evolution that Rudyard Kipling characterized as “Nature red in tooth and claw.”
So some children will act like predators. They attack anyone who’s different. Perhaps someone, like Keaton Jones, with a large nose, and ugly scars left from surgery for a brain tumour. (One TV commentator asserted, with no foundation I could find, that Keaton had been born with “cranial deformities.”)
Learning to back off
I thought our son had a raw deal too. From God. Or fate. Or whatever arranges these things. So I started writing about him, to generate sympathy and support. I got him a full-page feature in Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star. And an afternoon at a Toronto Maple Leafs practice, where he got to skate with Davey Keon, and took home a hockey stick signed by all members of the team.
I even got tentative approval for an article in Reader’s Digest, back then the Holy Grail for periodical writers. I checked an early draft of the article with my son, for his reactions
And he said, “I feel like you’re using me for your own reputation.”
I didn’t need profanity-laced tweets to make me back off. My own son did it.
I didn’t write about him again until after he had died.
When things get better
I hope that doesn’t happen to Kimberley Jones. Whatever our political differences, I know exactly how she felt. If the authorities at school weren’t going to protect her son, she would have to do it herself.
“It will probably get better someday,” Keaton said on the video clip. Probably. He’s now a celebrity himself. Some other students will band around him.
They did for our son. A small group of staunch friends gathered around him. The lead boy in his Scout troop. An Arab lad, himself an outsider. The son of Italian immigrants, short and solid as a fire hydrant. The Italian kid saw some bigger boys picking on our son. He decked the biggest of them with a single punch.
Yes, things will get better. As young people move up the evolutionary ladder, they do develop more compassion, more sensitivity. Most of them, anyway. By the time our son graduated from high school and went to university, he no longer needed his faithful bodyguards.
The same will happen to Keaton. I hope.
And mother Kimberley can fade into the background again. With or without Confederate flags.
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
The differences of opinion on last week’s column, arguing that free speech was also a matter of public health, became apparent in your letters.
Isobel McGregor wrote, “Thank you for this! It helped clarify my thinking on the difference between freedom of speech and dangerous 'unhealthy' hate speech.”
And Isabel Gibson disagreed: “Sorry, this is exactly about censoring speech. More, in Professor Peterson's case, his objection was to being required to use certain words -- so not just being censored, but being forced to speak/write in a given way. I suggest that also causes harm to society.
“The changes you note (e.g. the reduction in racial and sexual-orientation derogatives in everyday polite conversation) didn't come about through legislation, but through changes in the underlying attitudes.”
Bob Rollwagen suggested that speech is, in fact, a measure of a society’s health: “The use of language to create unrest or uncertainty is a very easy. Words like bullets, once projected, can never be retrieved. The intended meaning is left in the hands of the listener.
“In Canada, we seem to have some sense of what ‘hate’ is and have some laws to restrict or control it. It would appear that our neighbour to the south uses their definition of ‘freedom of speech’ to allow hate. Their leadership uses hate language to poison public health, or at least to maintain unhealthy viruses in some of the regions of the country.
“Language is a sign of mental health. A society that tolerates ‘hate’ could be seen as a society in decline, or at least, past it peak and soon to decline.”
Christopher Shreve made the connection between language and health: “Thank you for your reasoned reflection on the use of personal pronouns, and your call for better public health in vocabulary.”
Steve Roney didn’t: “You are absolutely wrong, and obviously wrong, to suggest that people can get sick and die from hearing some word.”
Tom Forgrave connected inclusive language to worship: “How do we make an [generic] word like ‘parent’ personal? What inclusive language has accomplished is to destroy any idea of a personal relationship with God. We can't say either father or mother because either would not be inclusive -- so we have to use an impersonal term. As a father and grandfather, I feel abandoned by that position… And all that stuff distances us from the Bible -- which maybe has something to say about our church's financial and membership position.
“For about ten years we have been snow birds in Arizona and have worshipped at a United Methodist church where ‘father’ is commonly used, the intincture method of Communion involves the server providing you a piece of bread with bare hands, and the closing involves liking hands across the sanctuary while a prayer is said. We've never heard anyone complain about any of those -- and there are about 1200 people at the service we attend, including lots of Canadians. Is there something we are missing in Canada?”
Robert Caughell expressed some frustration: “If people do not want to be referred to as he/she, him/her, or it, what/how do they want to be referred to? This entire issue has become insane/ridiculous.”
Norm Haug pulled the two poles together: “The anonymous complaint [about Lindsay Shepherd’s use of a video] came from ’one or more persons’ who were offended that two different perspectives of the use of personal pronouns were presented.
“Yes, ‘personal pronouns’ can be controversial and some people allegedly were offended, but there are any number of topics that are controversial and would no doubt be offensive to some people. What if Lindsay Shepherd had wanted to discuss Pro-Choice and some of her students were evangelicals? What if she wanted to discuss same-sex marriages or polygamous marriages and there were Muslim students who felt offended? And those are easy topics compared to discussions regarding euthanasia, capital punishment, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, or violence perpetrated by Antifa vs White Nationalists. It’s a slippery slope once issues start becoming censored. Who gets to decide?”
Norm suggested that Shepherd had an equal right to feel “offended” by her treatment at the hands of her departmental superiors. He ended, “Yes, public health is important, and free speech at our public institutions is healthy for our democracy.”
One last letter about the #MeToo hashtag column: David Gilchrist wrote, “Steve Roney hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that the Sexual Revolution did give many people (men and women) what they thought was permission to do what they wanted.
“Both genders have libido; and the aggressor is not always the male.
“Perhaps one difference between men and women is that the female is likely to feel devastated when a man goes further than she wants him to; but I did not feel violated under similar circumstances when the female wanted to go further than I was prepared for. I wonder how it is with other guys? I have never discussed this with anyone. I probably felt rather flattered (maybe because I could simply walk away, whereas the woman can’t always to do that?)”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols.
Ralph Milton ’s latest project is called “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at wwwDOTsinghallelujahDOTca
Ralph’s HymnSight webpage is still up, http://wwwDOThymnsightDOTca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca>
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawoodATgmailDOTcom to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom or twatsonATsentexDOTnet