Reply #63: Good for you

[jbnow]

You have guts. I hope she doesn't hassle you, but I know you can't ignore the screams of a child.

Whenever I hear of a child being hit I flash back to when my kids were young. I learned they publicly spanked kids at school. I went there and talked to the principal. My first issue was they were not allowed to hit my kids. If they ever wanted to, call me and we'd deal with it another way.
He assured me it would never be my kids. I assured him my kids acted up sometimes, they weren't perfect, but he still couldn't hit him. Then I began to talk about what I thought of the school policy.
He told me I was making too big a deal of it and I shouldn't worry because the kids they spanked all got beaten at home anyway, this was nothing to them.
We stared at each other. I asked if he heard what he said. he nodded and had the grace to blush and say maybe they should reconsider the policy. Maybe?

The principle was my neighbor, a very nice man and hearing the blase comment that the kids get beat at home anyway just made me sick.

Now my mind shifts another way. I lived in an apartment complex in Boulder for a while. When something happened people showed up pronto.A couple examples... A man was screaming at a woman in the parking lot and hit her...men came running from several apartments to stop him and several police cars were there within minutes.
I heard a neighbor screaming once. By the time I quickly dressed and got to the door there were several people there, turned out to be a kitchen fire which they promptly handled.
Life should be that way but it isn't. I've never seen that anywhere else. If the child was hit there that way you wouldn't have been out there alone.

I've confronted abusers a couple times in personal life (and worked with them professionally) but my post is long enough. Thank you for caring enough and though the kid made excuses for the mom...he knows someone cared enough to try to stop it.