Idiot. Jackass. Asshat. The Show!

A man steps onto a stage in front of a microphone before hundreds of people. This man suddenly balls up his fist and punches himself in the eye. The crowd, silent before, jumps to their feet and begin to cheer wildly as the entertainer before them proceeds to literally beat himself up.

Does this sound idiotic to you?

It's a TV show. I wish I was pulling your leg. I really do. But it's real and it's called Jackass.

There is a new quaint little word popping up on the internet here and there. I believe it began with the Etsy handmade artisan community. It's "asshat." This is the phenomenon where a person acts like an ass, is proud of it, and because of this pride they wear it like a hat every single day. That is asshattery. This phrase began being to be used when referring to Etsy's negligent staff of dorks who think it's funny to crash certain key parts of their site(their shop owner's way of making their living) and then go in the forums and ask, "So what kind of improvements would you like to see? Let's make a list." This same list is added to by shop owners and customers for about 200 pages and then promptly ignored by staff. They do the same thing every single week. And nothing on that list is ever implemented. Meanwhile, the person who depends on their Etsy shop profits to pay their bills is left swinging in the wind.

I mention idiocy and asshattery today for a number of reasons. The first is because of something which happened to my eight year old son last week. The second because of a phrase which pleroma gave me to meditate on in the shower this morning. The phrase was, "You're only as ignorant as you choose to be." As I contemplated this it gradually morphed into, "You're only as big of a jackass as you choose to be." Thus, the visualization of the show Jackass planted itself firmly in my mind this morning at 7:15am Eastern.

Slapping someone on the head with a Bible and shouting at them, "You're a jackass- go redeem yourself!" only works in a handful of cases. Most of those jackasses end up in a mental coma of "redemption" and screaming to masses of innocent pedestrians about the Apocalypse and how they were saved by Jesus. (see previous blog post about Redemption. Specifically, question #10.)

So what does work? How can we stop the asshattery?

Finding truth would seem to be a good start. Gnōthi Seauton, sweetheart! Know Thyself!

So when you find yourself and look at that immortal spark which is YOU standing in front of the mirror, what happens when you really don't like what you see?

Keeping this question in mind, let me divert a small portion of your attention to the incident which happened with my eight year old last week.

Two boys in red shirts climb on my son's school bus Wednesday afternoon. They then punch my son, rip the shoe and sock off one of his friends, steal this same friend's bookbag and play keep away with it. My son's friend is a kindergarten age child who, when he got off the bus that afternoon, was in tears carrying this shoe and sock over to his mother. My son grabbed the bookbag away from the two bullies and gave it to his friend.

I mention the red shirts because this is one of the main things my son could tell me about the boys to describe them. They were obviously new in school because the school's official uniform colors are blue, green, and white. Only newbies who don't know any better wear red shirts. (We should know. We did it at the beginning of the year. lol)

When the kindergartner's mother and I got together to decide a course of action the end result was a confrontation with not only the bus driver but the principal of the school and police officers. The bus driver wouldn't let us on the bus to have our children point out the two who terrorized them. He also stated that he didn't see anything happen the previous day. What, a child is bawling crying holding his shoe as he's getting off your bus and you don't notice? That doesn't pique your attention and sympathy, let alone common decency to inquire as to what happened to upset the child?

The school was about as helpful as a school of piranhas defending one of their own. Needlessly. The principal stated there was a camera on the bus. When we try to file a police report the police tell us that there was no incident to report without ever even looking at the tape. The asshattery continues.

Come to find out, there IS NO tape in the camera on the bus. It is mysteriously vacant of tape. No tape inside.

The principal then tells us the next day that the two children are not even enrolled in their school!!! Department of Children and Families had removed the boys(who lived on the other side of town) from their home earlier the previous day and thought it would be ok to stick them on any bus which was in the region their new caretakers were, not even bothering to enroll the children legally.

The boys were removed from the school that day and have not been seen since.

You've got a kindergarten age child terrified to go to school for fear those boys will rip his clothes off, a third-grader who is mystified about exactly what happened and is scratching his head at the whole thing, and two sets of parents wanting answers when there are none that the school is offering besides "hey, there was a sister on that bus. Didn't your children see her?" when wait- how did you know there was a sister on the bus if you didn't have a tape in the camera? Both my son and his friend emphatically deny there was a girl nearby who could have been the bully's sister. So why does the school mention this "sister" when it really has nothing to do with the incident?

We're looking into virtual/online schooling at this point. This is not the first case of asshattery we've seen from this particular school. As a matter of fact, it has been ongoing from the very first day.

I think our blue and green planet of Terra needs to be renamed Jackass, The Show.