Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The guy with the pies

Just over a week ago, there was a story about some guy who bought 23 pies at a Burger King for the purpose of not letting some spoiled brat in the middle of a temper tantrum from having one. Of course, lots of people chimed in...
"I love this man."
"This is amazing."
"A true hero!"
"Bravo sir. Bravo."
"I would have eating it in front of the kid and tell his mom you let you kid talk like that !!!! were did he /she get that from???? hummmm"
I don't want to comment directly on the incident itself; seems like there are questions about responsible parenting and common courtesy at the root of that and I know nothing about either of those concepts.
I do want to talk about some of these comments though, except for that last one because I have no idea what that person is trying to say. The other ones, though. The ones featuring the words "Love", "Amazing", "Hero" and "Bravo"? This is the level to which we have sunken, folks. Where we draw inspiration about making the world a better place from a bitchy little counter-tantrum (if it even happened) committed by someone else, not even something we did on our own. I think that qualifies as aggressively passive aggressive. Hey, troops deployed to Afghanistan and whatever other hellholes around the world; you're trying too hard. Just get somebody to pee in the enemies' drinking water and come on home.
Because obviously the most effective way to teach a child a lesson about indulging impulsive behavior is to lower yourself to that child's emotional and intellectual levels of maturity and then trumping that with cash. There's no way that kid comes away from that thinking that if you have money, you really can do whatever you want.
.

2 comments:

Erin Kane Spock said...

1. I like pie. It's a bummer they're baked now instead of fried. All that unhealthiness tasted great.
2. Hero is a bit much and it seems sort of like he's saying, "Nanny nanny boo boo" to the kid and thumbing his nose. Not a great role model himself (of course, it was probably totally satisfying and I'm a little jealous). I'm a teacher and deal with kids who have never been told no, never been held accountable. If the kid gets a bad grade it's my fault. Sort of scary to think about what these spoiled children will grow into.
Thanks for sharing.

Unknown said...

Hi Erin,
First, thanks for chiming in! I'm a fan of yours as well as pie and fried things.
Second, the good news is this probably didn't even happen. No doubt, there are spoiled kids out there who are going to be self-entitled train wrecks as adults. I know this because the self-entitled train wrecks are already out there and of course, they're breeding. But yeah, the severely lowered bar for what we consider heroism bothers me. There are all kinds of possible "what if scenarios (what if the child was developmentally disabled?), but at the end of the day, if this incident did happen as described, all that was "accomplished" was this person choosing to involve themselves in a difficult situation and then not helping.