ADDENDUM
I feel compelled to add to what I posted yesterday about
Adrian Peterson’s “discipline” techniques.
Somewhere in that post – and it should be just below – I said I thought
there was some chance that Peterson was one of those people who might do
better, once they knew better. At the
time I hadn’t seen the pictures or heard the accounts of the damage inflicted,
or heard his son’s utterances about having leaves stuffed in his mouth and
about being afraid to tell what happened for fear of it happening again. I had also not heard Adrian Peterson say “I
am not a child abuser. I feel bad.”
First off, Adrian, lots of child abusers feel bad. Child abuse isn’t about how you felt. It’s about what you did. What you might have said was, “I am a child abuser. I feel bad and I will do whatever I have to
do to become NOT a child abuser, including making a promise to the God I point
to before every game that I will never lay a hand, or a weapon, on a child
again. Ever.”
Again, I don’t care what the National Football League or the
Minnesota Vikings do with Adrian Peterson.
I’m sure that down the line they have enough money to pay enough P.R.
people to make this look very different than it was. For my money, I’ll never take Adrian on my
fantasy football team and I’ll never watch another Minnesota Viking game in
which he participates. Believe me, that
means dick to the Vikings or to Adrian Peterson but as Gandhi said, “There is
so very little we can do and it is so important that we do it.”
Adrian Peterson didn’t “discipline” his child. Adrian Peterson tortured his child, and ESPN
and the rest of the mainstream media need to call it by its name. If these exact measures were taken on a
kidnapped American or an American prisoner of war, it would be decried as
torture. If our government were to take
same measures against an “enemy combatant,” they’d go off-shore to do it.
The dictionary definition of “spank” is “to slap or smack with the open hand, especially on the buttocks.” You don’t
spank a person with a stick.
Charles Barkley said
on a pre-game show yesterday, that’s how black folks in the south “discipline”
and by these standards every black parent in the south would be in prison. I’m a big fan of Barkley and I’ll defer to
him any time on the actions of black folks, even though I know southern black
people who are absolutely appalled at Adrian Peterson’s behavior. Best I let THEM take Charles on. But this isn’t a racial thing. Barkley needs to defer to me on the actions
of white folks. I grew up in rural,
lily-white Idaho and this shit was all over the place. I ran child abuse and anger management groups
for twenty years in Eastern Washington and those groups were ninety five
percent white and we had waiting lists. Adrian
Peterson may have learned his techniques from a mean black dad, but I can match
mean white dads, dad for dad, with anyone who wants to take the challenge.
In his first public
statement, Peterson said, among other things, “I’m not a perfect parent.” Who in the WORLD thinks we’re talking about
perfection here? How about we take that
word out of the conversation.
Adrian Peterson says
he’s a Christian. I wonder, if in his
WILDEST imagination he can picture Jesus bruising an cutting a four year old
child with a stick.
In case Adrian might
consider advice from another black football player who came up hard – a
Hall-of-Famer – I give him Cris Carter.
