No, not the best

Two things about this Adrian Peterson situation continue to piss me off.

The first thing is, the people who are still defending him by saying that they got hit by their parents and they turned out just fine.  These people are defending a super strong grown man who took a small tree limb off a tree, took the leaves off it, stuffed them in his four year old son's mouth, and then whipped the boy until he raised bloody welts on the little boy's body.  Really?  People are going to defend that shit?  THERE IS NO WAY THAT SHIT IS NOT ABUSE.  And you defend him by saying that you got hit?  So the fuck what?  The fact that you got hit and turned out all right doesn't make what Peterson did right or excuse his brutality in any way.  It, in fact, proves that you were raised by abusive psychotic parents who had no business hitting children and it proves that you did not turn out fine because you still condone violence towards children.

I was hit as a child.  My mother used a belt to spank us with and it was wrong.  My aunt and uncle., John and Gerrie Iwaniszek, who I was sent to live with after my mother was killed on the operating table in 1972, hit me and my siblings.  They used belts, switches, their fists, they threw pots and pans at us, they hurled insults at us.  Most every Sunday my aunt would make pot roast with potatoes and carrots for Sunday lunch.  Even though the taste and texture of cooked carrots made me gag and vomit, she tried to force me to eat them in order to prove that she was in charge.  She'd threaten me with physical violence and she enlisted her children in her sick and twisted crusade to make me eat what made me sick.  They were encouraged to tell her if they saw me not eating carrots and boy, did they ever love to tell on me.  So for years I hated to see Sunday lunch come around knowing that I was going to have to endure all that anxiety and possible violence.  I fucking hated it.  And in their minds, even now after all those years later, they all still think they nothing wrong.  It was one big joke to them.  One of the last things my horrible aunt said to me before she died was she wanted me to come visit her and she said, "I promise, I won't make any carrot jokes."  Her supper table abuse never was a joke to me.  Having to endure violence, the threat of violence, and the anxiety that surrounded Sunday lunch was never a laughing matter to me, I literally feared for my safety.  And why did I have to go through that shit?  Because some twisted old bitch wanted to prove she was in charge of me and because she thought it was fine to hit, slap, and make me suffer through psychological abuse because she was in charge and she got hit when she was a kid and she 'turned out fine.'

Her husband and children were just as bad as she was.  Uncle John tried to punch me for smarting off to him and he nearly wrecked the car he was driving on the interstate in the late 1970's on a trip to Michigan because he wanted to beat my sister Sandy.  He had a hair trigger temper that he didn't have a problem turning on me and my siblings because we weren't really his kids and because he got hit by his parents and he 'turned out fine.'   When my cousin John Jr. found out I would sneeze uncontrollably after getting hit in the nose, he would knock me to the ground and punch my nose to make me sneeze and he'd laugh like crazy, sometimes, he'd just reach over when I least suspected it and punch me in my face to make me sneeze.  And if I dared complain to his parents, they'd tell me to stop being a tattle tale.  His brother Matthew was even worse.  He went around telling anyone who would listen that I was gay, in his mind I had to be gay because I liked to read, wore glasses, was shy around girls, and I didn't like to shoot or trap animals.  He'd hit and beat on me at school and he encouraged his friends to do the same.  He even shot at me once, he fired a .22 rifle at my head but thankfully it missed me and hit the trailer were living in at the time, and his father didn't yell at him for shooting at me, he yelled at him for shooting at the trailer.

That's the kind of shit I had to put up with from people who's parents hit them and who thought they turned out 'just fine.'  Fuck that shit.  No one turns out just fine after being on the receiving end of physical and mental abuse. And no, I'm not ever forgiving any of them for what they did to me and my late siblings, they can all rot in hell for all I care.

The other thing I hate about this Adrian Peterson situation is, the amount of people who say that their parents did the best they could even though they hit their kids.  No.  If your parents or guardians hit you, then they didn't do they best they could when raising you.  They betrayed you by hitting you.  They stole your innocence and forced violence on you.  They didn't do their best, they did a shitty job of raising you and they owe you an apology.