ISawArkansas

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News commentators and reporters are held to a particularly high standard because what they say can have such a personal effect. They are expected to remain impartial, yet all use every adjective they can fit into a breath. Adjectives are judgmental – Comical. Tragic. Wholesome. Delightful. Gross.

Shouldn’t the media just tell us the news and let us decide if it’s immoral, improper or impossible?

There’s a word people say in otherwise polite conversation that can be a noun, a verb (transitive and intransitive), an adverb, a gerund, an adjective, pronoun and interjection. It can even be maternal.

Coaches, corporals and kids use this word. Newspapers put asterisks in the place of two letters, and TV stations bleep it. Its power comes from its emphasis.

It’s profane, intense and occasionally very funny.

And it was heard around town a lot recently coming from the mouths of normally chilled people.

Our town was put in a vortex of vile language because of helplessness against, oh get ready, bullies!

We’re all familiar with bullies. Mine was Roy Junior who told me I couldn’t play baseball with the boys because I was a girl. We were seven! I said fine, give me my mitt back. He threw it at me. I socked him in the nose, blood spurted, Roy Junior started crying and nobody remembered who was on first.

Roy Junior’s mom called my mom and said Mary Pat cracked Roy Junior’s nose and a tooth and what did my parents plan to do about it? My mother thanked his mother for calling, hung up, and she and my dad fell back on the couch laughing.

It was etched into my child-brain that bullies could be dealt with.

I was so wrong.

I was the bully. I was punished, my mitt taken away, couldn’t see my friends, and only our dog, Boots, would listen to my side.

Then I grew up, threw no more punches, moved to a state no one I knew could find on a map and assumed bullies were just part of growing up and I’d never come across one again.

I was so wrong.

It’s weird to do what you love and not bother anybody who doesn’t need bothering, then find that you’re a target because you’re a girl. Or because you don’t blindly obey. Or slither up to those with perceived power.

The CAPC hired a competent woman who understands that respect has to be earned, not demanded. I imagine she was neither prepared nor amused to find that those who had done exactly the same legal financial maneuver in order to maintain a roof and a kitchen were her detractors.

What has happened in the last month with the Tourism Director at the CAPC was bullying, pure and simple. Why would anyone risk a career to circulate an agenda that had nothing to do with her professional experience and competence? Who instigated this? Why?

Those who bully are frequently rewarded because their target just gives up and hands over their lunch money. Thank goodness that didn’t happen here. It could have.

All bullies have to do is blend with rather than spurn success, knowing that tourism enhancement should

work for all of us.

And not say that asterisked word unless it’s funny.