Whose Child Is This?

This tweet appeared on my timeline and agitated my soul.

Whose child is this? To what ring of Hell has our society descended when someone's 22 year old daughter with no credit history thinks her opinion matters with respect to paying taxes and how that translates into someone else's salary? Some girl whose apparent job is to talk shit on social media believes she has more worth than the person whose job it is to prevent bombs from boarding airplanes with your emotional support animals. And then had the audacity to tweet that nonsense...while posing in that damn red hat.

That hat. The one that proclaims the exact opposite of what it states. Last week it was worn by that child at the Lincoln Memorial who insisted on his right to stare down a Native American Marine veteran. Then he convinces a national audience to sympathize with him because his class trip got ruined, so now he gets to return and visit the White House. Let my child touch a makeup display, and y'all get extra, but let some kid in that red hat goad folks into a needless confrontation and they will get a lawyer and a PR firm to justify their behavior.

Who do these insolent children think they are?

But this isn't just about those hats (even though that only intensifies my disgust). Nor is this another Black Mama rant about how my child would never be afforded the benefit of the doubt. Pointing out the double and triple standards of systematic inequality is an exercise in futility. Yet, I am going to say what I have to say anyway, because it must be said (even if it isn't heard):

YOU ARE RAISING YOUR CHILDREN TO BE ASSHOLES. 

ENTITLED, SELF-IMPORTANT, REMORSELESS ASSHOLES.

While the impact of the government shutdown was felt across the economic spectrum of the Washington area, the face of that disruption became the Black workers who were standing on food lines, not the white workers who were dipping into their IRA accounts. Both situations were frustrating examples of how people's real-life hardships had very little influence on lawmakers and Administration officials. Those visuals were all the more uncomfortable when it became clear that there was almost no sympathy for the people who were being forced to work without pay.

So the very idea that Little Miss MAGA felt entitled to suggest that anybody's job was to bow and scrape to the likes of her just stirred up all the antebellum rage I could contain. A similar kind of ire was provoked by Little Mr. MAGA, who wanted us to believe that he would have the right to stare down his Vietnam vet grandfather or great-uncle with that smug smirk. (And I know, Nathan Phillips was a problematic victim; I read the article and I'm sensitive to his misrepresentation issues. But he sure was swiftly and conveniently discredited...)

Maybe it is because we've seen this behavior before. We've seen the smug faces, the sense of entitlement, the disdain for the other. The indifference some people have expressed over children being separated from their parents at the border is the same indifference shown to slave families on the auction block. The same self-satisfied visage has been captured on the face of every lynch mob participant gathered around a smoldering body. Taunting crowds similarly harassed children who sought to integrate schools. So no Miss MAGA, we are not amused by your attempt to diminish TSA workers the same way people used to refer to all Pullman Porters as George.

These aren't kids being kids when they blatantly disrespect people of color with impunity. These are your bad eggs. God help you when those chickens come home to roost.