Can One Take a Working Measure of Someone Based on Only a Couple of their Sentences? — Consider the Casually Malevolent Mayor of Airway Heights, Washington

© 2015 Peter Free

 

16 July 2015

 

 

Basic nastiness sometimes reveals itself in just a few words

 

Take this mean-spirited incident:

 

 

A Washington state mayor has refused to resign over a Facebook post that compared President Barack Obama’s family to gorillas and monkeys because he says that it would be conceding that he is a racist.

 

“Gorilla face Michelle, can’t disagree with that,” the message said.

 

“The woman is not attractive except to monkey man Barack. Check out them ears. LOL.”

 

[Patrick] Rushing explained the remark as “just playful back and forth banter that my friends and I do.”

 

Although Rushing offered an apology, the Airway Heights City Council decided on Tuesday that he had not gone far enough, and asked the mayor to resign. But he refused.

 

“I made a mistake. I owned up to my mistake,” Rushing insisted. “If I do resign that’s admitting I’m a racist and I’m not.”

 

© 2015 David Edwards, Mayor won’t resign over ‘Gorilla face’ Michelle Obama rant because ‘that’s admitting I’m racist’, RawStory (15 July 2015)

 

 

Allow me to be childish

 

Was Rushing’s behavior just “playful banter”?

 

Click on the above link and take a look at the Mayor’s own face. Does he look like someone who should be critiquing other people’s appearances in the contemptuous manner that he did?

 

 

The moral? — Occasionally, just a few words demonstrate who we are

 

A diseased and unkind soul chooses phrases like Mayor Rushing’s. And then blandly avoids remedial self-analysis.

 

There are millions and millions more people like the Mayor out there, cocooned in White Person Self-Entitlement that claims superiority via the avenue of missing sense and compassion. When their malevolent words occasionally slip out, we are forewarned to protect ourselves from the darkness that generates them.