Child exploitation
AP Photo/Ron Edmonds
Anyone with human feelings couldn’t help but be heartsick at the sight of the now-notorious security video of Tuesday’s unprovoked taunting of and violent physical attack on a 17-year-old Belleville West High School student as he tried to take a seat on a school bus.
The teen who was attacked was white. The attack was brought by two black students, and some other black students on the bus participated in the taunting. One black student tried to intervene on behalf of the victim.
A Belleville police captain at first said he believed the attack might have been racially motivated. He backtracked on this statement, calling his characterization “premature” and a “personal and emotional comment after only seeing the video briefly.”
But it was too late. Rush Limbaugh, the trash talker from Cape Girardeau, used the high school students as props in a calculated effort to foment racial hatred. Consider these words, going out to millions of listeners in his national broadcast, including three hours every weekday on KMOX-AM, which claims to be “The Voice of St. Louis”:
“(In) Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety. But in Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,’ and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white. Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen (are) destroying civility in the House of Representatives.
“We can redistribute students while we redistribute their parents’ wealth. We can redistribute everything. Just return the white students to their rightful place, their own bus with bars on the windows and armed guards. They’re racists. They get what they deserve.”
Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist for the Dallas Morning News, took on Mr. Limbaugh’s apologists who claimed the broadcaster had engaged in sarcasm. Mr. Dreher wrote that Mr. Limbaugh’s comments were sarcasm only “if by ‘sarcasm’ you mean using vile racial and ethnic tropes to make a political point.”
“How do you think things would go,” he asked, “if Limbaugh said something like this, if, say, Joe Lieberman were president? ‘It’s Lieberman’s America, is it not? Lieberman’s America, gentiles getting defrauded and robbed by Jews on Wall Street. You put your money in a mutual fund, you expect security. But in Lieberman’s America the non-Jews now get robbed blind….”
Mr. Limbaugh’s statements are even more malignant. They exploit children in the cause of racism.
The Belleville West bus incident takes its place among uncounted acts of hurtful cruelty perpetrated by children against their peers. They play out daily at schools across the nation. They become the shame of a community when responsible adults fail to keep children under a watchful eye and take a swift, tough line against bullies — including bullies like Rush Limbaugh.
The police officer is a responsible man and it is easy to forgive such a man. It is very hard to forgive people such as Rich Limbaugh because they never acknowledge or even recognize their wrongs and flaws.
People like Rush Limbaugh are truly so spiritually sick that it is what we recognize in the world and medically as mental illness.
And we must not hate people like Rush Limbaugh put pity them and pray that God will change their sick dark hearts. Who knows maybe he can still be changed and God has not completely handed him over no matter how much it may appear to appear hat way.
By the way, KMOX should be ashamed for being such money whores to this darkness for profit. They should be embarrassed about spreading this sickness that is like the worst kind of diseases.
No doubt, KMOX will fall down due to this darkness that they have attached themselves to. They think more highly of themselves than they are, narcissistically believing they are part of the upstanding in society when in fact they have joined the world of the dark taking part in pushing sleaze and trash.
I ceased listening to KMOX when Rush came on board.
For a while now I’ve been trying to get people to call him Gush Faux Pas. Now maybe it’ll stick. His presence on radio shames the state of Missouri.
Rush is an entertainer who will say anything to keep his ratings. He is a demagogue using the equivalent of political porn to appeal to the basest and meanest side of his followers, the John Holmes of modern McCarthyism. He’s a drug addict with no sense of honor, civility or morality. He and Beck strain one’s belief in freedom of the press. And although it is a sad commentary that so many listeners buy into his spewing, it’s nothing new. He was preceded by Coughlin, Lindbergh, Thurmond, Birch, and others, and most thoughtful Americans finally saw how ugly and harmful they were and rejected them. Rush too shall pass.
There certainly would be a different tune played in this forum had the colors been reversed. You cannot deny that. If white kids were beating up a black kid on a bus and all the white kids were cheering do you think this would blow over so easily? Even if race didn’t start it? Who would be doing the exploiting then? Certainly this Editorial Board would be calling the act racist. Certainly Rev. Jackson would be flying into town. Certainly there would be a post on the “Conversation About Race” blog.
It is good that you are tackling the exploitation of children. I fully expect from now on that you will not post any editorials where you will use children to support your cause.
After a white teenager is beaten by two black thugs with the majority of the bus cheering them one, does anyone really think that the most important issue is what a radio talk show thinks? Other medial figures including Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman have made far less plausible accusations of racism against a far larger cross-section of citizens. Where are the editorials calling them out? Elected officials such as Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters have also made deeply offensive racist remarks. Where is the outrage?
I do not know if race played a role in the student’s treatment (neither do the editors of the Post Dispatch or the posters on this blog). However, I am pretty sure if the races had been reversed we would had had the usually racial antagonists (Al Shartpon, Jessie Jackson, etc) clamoring to charge the entire community with the sin of racism. Every incident that involves white on black crime (which is virtually statistically insignificant) is immediately branded as racial. The first words out of the mouth of the press and authorities after black on white crime are “this was not a racial incident.”
We will never move forward until we start viewing people as individuals rather than a representative of their race. Also, the deception regarding “civil rights” leaders needs to end. The distinction between a racist and a civil rights leader in today’s vernacular is often the color of the person’s skin.
Seems hypocritical to call this “child exploitation.” What I’d call child exploitation is using children as tools to advocate tax hikes, political campaigns, and even the expansion of publicly funded healthcare. This is something that liberal activists, and their friends on the Post-Dispatch editorial board, have done so often that it is strange to read Mr. Roth’s editorials, which though I feel are horribly inaccurate, are at least based upon something other than sentimental appeals using children.
Wow, I didn’t know that Rush Limbaugh was the one that provoked that attack on a kid because he wanted to sit down on a bus.
I also didn’t know that Rush Limbaugh posted the entire video on the front page of the PD website for the exploitation of the children involved.
By the way, children do not viciously beat the snot out of other children. Little punks might, but children don’t.
Nick Kasoff,
I can’t think of many things much worst than children not having access to meaningful healthcare. If you see this truth as exploiting children then that it is okay when it is a TRUTH that attention needs to be brought to for change, attention is the ONLY way to cause change.
What do you call what Republicans are doing marching for autistic children to receive the care that they need? That would be child exploitation also by your judgment, wouldn’t it?
I hope that these children get this added benefit, but at least they receive the basic care where many children DO NOT HAVE SUCH ACCESS and my only problem are with the “Donkey Holes” who are supporting this cause but came against the cause for the children of the working poor having access to healthcare.
—Typically blind stupidity from the Ivory Tower inhabitants of the P.D. Editorial Board. While lamenting supposed “racist comments” from Rush Limbaugh, who is simply satirizing the real racial divisiveness being stoked by others, the P.D. blindly side-steps the point while attacking and distorting the meaning of those who are commenting on it. They have once again proven they just don’t “get it”, or is it something more sinister?
—Rush’s motif of “illustrating absurdity by being absurd”, is either beyond the P.D.’s comprehension capability, or they are covertly attempting to distort the truth in an attempt to take our eyes from the real examples of racial division. I understand their rabid dislike of someone who so expertly pokes holes in the MSMs’ and liberals’ attempts at stoking racial division for political gain, but their transparent distortions are easily debunked.
—We have Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, and an army of liberal talking head-cases willfully exploiting the divisions in society today, and the P.D. can’t see, or blatantly side-steps the obvious. Yet they are willing contributors in excoriating those who do “get it”, while adding fuel to the smoldering fires. Disgustingly typical.
—Political satire is like hanging fresh meat in the faces of a pack of dogs, knowing the feeding frenzy that will occur. The P.D. Editorial Board
takes the bait, and rabidly and predictably runs with it. They look right past the targets of the satire, and instead target the people commenting on the frenzy. The funny thing is, despite being burned in the past, they continue to take the bait.
–Psychologists say insanity is continuing to make the same mistakes while hoping for different results. The PD’s behavior is predictably and regrettably insane.
—As Rush would add, “thanks for playing along.”