Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Racist named and shamed; Tram wishes to remain an omnibus.

I can't help but have noticed that the world slid another 0.002% towards complete and utter meltdown over the last couple of days when some daft bint decided to be openly racist on public transport. A clip got posted on youtube, got several billion trillion gazillion views and then found its way onto the news. And then the "woman" (and I use the word in its loosest term) in question, Emma West, got arrested. It was like a really dull technology heavy episode of CSI: Croydon.

And "Tram Bigot" also sounds like the sort of random password you'd get on the back of the cardboard case of old AOL disks through the post.

If you haven't watched the clip yet then be prepared for some very harsh language. To her credit, her colour recognition skills are second to none. Like some kind of pigment fixated variant of the Count from Sesame Street, she happily (and swearily) points out the colour of pretty much everybody sitting around her, as though that were an insult.

In all seriousness though, she's vile. What chance does her poor son have in life with that as a role-model? He even has an action figure doing a Hitler salute. Don't tell me that he doesn't have issues. Poor little sod is probably going to get the Josef Mengele variant of the Operation board game for Christmas.

So, so far so good. Justice prevails. Woman breaks law and gets arrested. Good job all round, Mr. Plod.

But then it starts getting weirder. Logically, the number of "dislikes" on the video goes up rapidly (this video is the only every kind you'd post and actively want people to dislike it), but for every five "dislikes", it gets a "like" as well. Only one, mind, but still one too many.

And the most common reason for people liking the video and in some cases proclaiming her as a brave patriot? "Well done her. She's daring to say the things we're all thinking."

Well now, sunshine, imma stop you there. If the youtube likes and dislikes can be taken as a guideline, then this definitely isn't the case. And she certainly isn't saying the kind of things that I'M thinking, otherwise it'd be a considerably duller video with her banging on about what christmas presents she's going to buy for people, how to level up her alchemy skill quickly in Skyrim, whether those Breville One-cup hot water dispensers are worth getting or not and whether to have curry or chinese as her next takeaway. Ooh, or maybe pizza. The only slightly racist element of my thoughts might be me accidentally referring to the 'chinese' as 'the chinky' but I'm trying to stop that, honestly.

Emma West isn't a brave patriot protecting us against the vile scourge of foreigners. She's exactly the sort of person that makes me ashamed to be human, let alone English. There is more honour in the restraint that her fellow passengers show than from one single word of the foul racist bile she's spouting.

So, let's not tar us all with the same brush with that sweeping sentence, shall we? The people I know and choose to hang around with don't think like that. Assumptions like that are invalid and dangerous and don't work, except for the sweeping generalisation I'm going to make now.

If you clicked 'like' on that video, you're a fucking idiot.

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