Breaking Stereotypes Fail.

Some ethnicities just don’t want to help themselves do they?

Now I’m no racist; oh sure, I don’t trust carneys and no, I wouldn’t be happy with Gyppos moving in on the front lawn and okay, I have some unresolved issues with Asians and AK47’s, but I am on the whole, as racially tolerant as the next frightened Caucasian.

Yet sometimes I wonder if some of the minorities who we share this country of ours with are determined to turn me. And why do they have such an aversion to being proven wrong? Granted, nobody likes to be proven wrong but these guys take that shit personally.

Example One:

I was attending Junior’s football game the other day, a rare occasion for me as I coach another team and their games are seldom at opposite times.

Ten minutes in and the tone for the game is set when a bunch of taxi drivers – and I’m not using the term as a racial stereotype, there were literally three taxis parked up to watch the one boy – started laying into the ref, our ref, because young Imran had just been knocked to the ground in a hard, but fair, tackle.

It didn’t seem to matter to them that Imran was the biggest boy on the field and quite possibly 16, not eleven like the rest of the boys. Nor did it seem to matter that Imran was playing a contact sport in which there is quite frequently, contact. No, any time Imran went over, which was often, the Wellington Combined section of the crowd would launch into the same anti ref tirade that got real boring, real fucking quick.

One of the Dad’s in my son’s team, all seven foot of him, decided to have a quiet word with the contenders for ‘father sof the year’ and suggest to them that they consider just what effect their words were having on the boys.

He might as well have suggested that they all go and suck their mother’s cocks given the response he got. Which was all rather predictable really, but given that he is a very successful lawyer of many years experience and they, well, taxi drivers, things got sorted real quick. An argument over who gets the next spot on the rank this wasn’t.

Needless to say it was a mis-match on and off the field. Imran fell over a few more times before the games end, our boys won the game and the entire sorry contingent left with some dirty looks our way, having done there bit for closer community relations.

Example Two:

Being the modern, new age Dad that I am, I like to drop my son off at school each morning. It’s a dicey bit of logistics on a dry day, but when it’s persisting down it’s like that bit on Star Wars where Luke attacks the Death Star in his X Wing.

Right outside the entrance to Junior’s school is a crossing and next to that, a bus stop. Having dropped him off I pulled out into the traffic. A bus had stopped in the opposite lane and was off loading the several hundred kids these things seem capable of holding in the mornings, which meant they were all drifting across the crossing, in small groups.

Amongst all this, some dude – let’s call him Kamahl – made the decision to squeeze in behind the bus and pedestrian crossing all the while trying to turn across my lane into the driveway. Had his car been, say, a pushbike, it wouldn’t have posed a problem but now it was pissing with rain and I couldn’t see kids behinf him entering the crossing on his side of the road. Real cool.

So we did what all good folk do in this type of situation; we had a verbal altercation from the safety of our cars. I mentioned that his not waiting till the other side of the crossing was clear was endangering the children, but the suggestion was drowned out by his claiming to be “not on the crossing. I am not on the crossing!”.

He was right of course, he wasn’t. But he was still endangering kids, still in the wrong and still a complete fuckwit. But then what can I say, some ethnicities just don’t want to help themselves and break down the stereotypes do they?