VERY DEMOTIVATIONAL

This is a post that is going to have a lot of wry reflection in it and is a Very Special Episode, so you know, draw up a chair.   A Takeaway Lesson will be included at no extra charge.

I discovered a fun website called verydemotivational dot com and I'm not linking it and here's the deal.

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I had a lot of fun making up silly posters like the Tiger Mom one.  I would make one, upload it to my hard drive, and delete it.  I made a whole bunch, like this one:

And I made this one:

And then I went on with my fabulous life.

Imagine my utter amazement when I received an email from vd saying that my poster had made the top page and CONGRATULATIONS!

Well, okay, whatever.   I deleted it--I SWEAR I DID.  Check my page carolinagrrl and see that there are no posters there.   

But all posters become the property of the website and somehow it didn't get deleted.  I cannot delete it.  I've sent a piteous email to the people at the site begging them to delete it immediately but they only work weekdays, so I haven't heard anything back yet.

People hate it.  They HATE IT.  The comments are vicious beyond vicious.  Somebody claimed to be 18, from India, and the creator of the poster.    It's gotten like 700 or so votes down and 400 or so votes up.

I posted and begged people to stop being mean.  That works well on the internet, of course.  Just like chanting at the moonlight while licking toad's blood cures fibromyalgia.

So here is the Very Special Episode:   Tom Cruise says he doesn't think about color when he looks at his African American son.  I get it, because I don't think about color when I look at my kids.

BUT THE WHOLE WORLD DOES.  AND SO DO THEY.  EVERY TIME THEY LOOK IN A MIRROR.

I just finished reading Sammy Davis Jr.'s biography when he talks about playing clubs in Florida near beaches with signs saying "NO N..., Jews, or dogs" and how he was threatened with death by some Hollywood mogul because of his relationship with Kim Novak.

Dr. Martin Luther King died in vain I think sometimes...like when I heard people in South Carolina joking they'd like to choose between taking a holiday on James Earl Ray's birthday (the cretin who assassinated the father of 4 young children and a hero) and Dr. King's birthday.

And the deal is that you can't brush off your kid's ethnicity by saying that you don't think about color.  Because you aren't parenting them. You're tossing off meaningless platitudes.

Being a parent means teaching your kids about hate, and preparing them to face a world where people believe that Asian kids are super smart, African American kids are dumb, and Caucasian kids are....ah, who cares what they are?  They're the right color, so they can be anything they want.  Fat, skinny, athletic, not, math wizards, not math wizards, good at basketball, horrible at basketball, etc etc etc. 

Nobody will ever look at a white kid sitting in an exclusive classroom, walking over a name campus, or sitting in a prestigious office and think, "Eh, the token minority hire.  They must be stupid/brilliant."

AND THAT IS WHY WE DON'T NEED A WHITE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT OR A WHITE ONLY COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP FUND AND SHUT UP ALREADY.

People thought I was making fun of adoption, or making fun of Asian kids, or....I swear, I don't know what they were thinking.  It wasn't very funny.  I knew that.  It wasn't meant to be.  It was just a little joke poster I made for us.  

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But it certainly taught me a lesson.   The average reader of vd still thinks that interracial adoption is ridiculous, bizarre, stupid, etc.

I live in a world where I have enlightened, intelligent friends online and IRL.  I have sheltered myself from the type of people who wrote horrible stuff about this silly little poster.

I thought things were nicer out there.   They aren't.

Here's the Takeaway Lesson--People, if you aren't Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt,   Madonna, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, or Katherine Heigl--and you adopt a child who doesn't look like you, remember.

They will be facing the people who commented and voted on my poster when they go to the movies, out to eat, to school, college, a date, a job interview, whatever.

Prepare them.  

ETA:  www.verydemotivational.com took down the poster at my request.  Thank you!  Lesson learned, and thank you Miss Cellania for the suggestion to make a poster and take a screen shot.  Save a poster, and the website probably has terms of service that state it owns the rights to the poster.