According to a report on independent entertainment web site Digital Spy, parents have started a campaign against a new CBeebies presenter.
She must have done something really terrible to warrant that, eh? Sworn or cursed in a programme, perhaps? Advocated the use of illegal drugs? Attacked and killed someone in the street?
Wrong.
Cerrie Burnell’s “crime” is that she has only one arm.
Yes, the BBC has dared to employ someone with a physical disability to front a programme for young children who (according to one angry father) might “suffer nightmares” because of it.
Right… so it’s OK for four and five year olds to have computers and TVs in their bedrooms (according to recent statistics, a significant proportion do) and thus not be monitored by their parents, and yet it’s somehow not OK for a young child to see someone who may be slightly different to them?
Presumably these parents don’t take their children out to the shops (for fear of meeting someone who might walk, talk or look slightly different from their idealised model of human perfection) or to the local nursery (stop the press: some children have disabilities too!)
One (supposed) parent wrote on the CBeebies message boards: “”Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?”
Well, it obviously isn’t just you, but it darn well should be.
Goodness knows what these parents think their kids have to be protected from.
At what age will they deem that it’s acceptable to introduce the subject of disability (and discrimination, for that matter) to their kids?
Perhaps they’ll just let their children grow up until one day their cottonwool-wrapped darlings see someone a bit different in the street and, not having been educated or informed any differently, shout out “Mummy, what’s wrong with that woman?”
If only the child had pointed at their parents and asked the question.
(Via Digital Spy)
I’m not quite sure what to make of this story. An 88-year-old grandmother, Lucille Greene, who every year sent a quantity of home baked fruit cake to her friends and relatives, was allegedly humiliated in December 2002 when she arrived at her local post office in Magnolia to post her bounty.
Apparently a postal worker quizzed her “What kind of explosives do you have in here?” and then shook the box.
She said that others in the post office laughed at her, leaving her upset and in tears. When she left the PO, she tripped over a concrete parking barrier and fell, breaking her glasses and chipping a tooth.
I’m not sure her claim for $250,000 in damages was ever going to go through (it didn’t) but the judge was sympathetic to her cause, saying that the clerk “was likely being less than courteous” despite following standard procedures for suspicious packages.
OK just one thing: since when was it standard procedure to shake a package you suspect contains explosives?
Lucille sent a couple of cakes to her lawyer this year.
