Just the other day Woodsy posted a lovely photo of a young red-haired boy on her blog because she happens to have a weakness for young red-haired boys.
Today, I read this in the news. Canadian teenagers spent Thursday assaulting red-haired people just because they happened to have red hair. There’s a Facebook group called Kick a Ginger Day which originated in Vancouver. It quickly gathered over 5000 members.
The kids got the idea from an episode of South Park which claimed that “redheads are soulless and inherently evil” and that they are “nasty” and “born with a disease.”
November 20th was designated as this auspicious occasion.
So, redheaded kids all over Canada (especially western Canada) were kicked and beaten on Thursday and mocked for being “soulless, evil, diseased and nasty.” Most didn’t even understand what was going on until later in the day. Many ended up in hospital.
All over BC and Alberta redheads were swarmed and beaten by gangs of their fellow students or just randomly kicked as they went about their day. In BC one kid talked about how he kicked 80 times during the course of the day.
Other redhaired kids who were wise to the Facebook group stayed home from school out of fear.
This past week was also International Bullying Awareness Week.
“It was all a joke”, non-redhaired kids are saying.
Police, however, are treating this as a hate crime. Kids have been suspended from school and in some cases criminal charges are being laid.
It’s all exceedingly creepy. We can blame South Park, but it’s clearly just a TV show about animated idiots who do idiotic things that no real human being does?
How does a kid’s brain go so quickly from watching this cartoon to deciding that because the cartoon makes some random, idiotic statements that it would be a fun joke to savagely beat up your friends and classmates?
And we still pretend to be stumped as to how easily Hitler got so many people to jump on the Anti-Semite bandwagon; or how ignorant 19th century Americans were to treat their fellow human beings as slaves; or how some ignorant 21st century Americans still treat their fellow human beings; or how something like Apartheid could possibly exist; or how horribly some middle-eastern countries treat their fellow citizens. Seems it doesn’t take much to get us to gang up on each other.
