The Most Horrific Thing We Have Ever Seen Tweeted on Twitter That Wasn't Said By Claire McCaskill
Honestly, we have no idea what to say to this.
There are maybe 10 moments in life when we were so stunned by something we just didn’t know what to say or do. One of those was riding in an elevator with Oprah Winfrey and several important people here in Chicago about 4 years ago when she let out an ear-splitting, elephantine fart and everyone else pretended they didn’t hear a damn thing. And they didn’t smell anything either. The Germans were more subtle on the Western Front with mustard gas than Lake Michigan’s own Charybdis is with the olfactory encore of that afternoon’s chili-con-carnage.
Another time was being handed the newspaper on the day Matthew Shephard was found brutalized and clinging to life in Wyoming and seeing his sweet, delicate face for the first time as someone read aloud what those heathens did to him, realizing that, living in Cleveland, surrounded by ignorance, that something just like that could have happened to one of us too.
9/11.
The Challenger explosion, which we watched live eating cereal in the living room as kids, dropping the spoon into the milk and making a big splash that soaked our tan He-Man pajamas (which our mother insisted we have instead of the Jem ones, because the Jem ones were periwinkle and would, in her mind, make us grow up to be gay, so we had to have the He-Man ones instead…WHOOPS).
And, seriously, this Tweet on Twitter today isn’t of the earth-shaking, international news variety, but it really and truly did make our blood run cold…and we just don’t know what to say about it.
So just read it, and the article in Politics Daily that discusses it.
In short, a pregnant woman in a board meeting tweeted that she was having a miscarriage. If she had stopped there, we would have chalked it up to TMI.
But, she went further.
She actually tweeted how glad she was that she miscarried, because the state she lives in is “f***ed up” and requires a three week waiting period for an abortion.
Never before have we understood what motivates people to stand outside abortion clinics screaming and yelling at the women going inside…but we caught a sense of that in reading that callous and perverse tweet.
Now, we aren’t saying we agree with those protestors in any way…so don’t jump on us and start any attacks. We have several friends who were brutally raped; two of those rapes resulted in pregnancies; one of those led to an abortion. We also have another friend whose life was threatened by her pregnancy, and she had no choice if she wanted to live. So, we know real life good people who had to make the most difficult choices of their lives…and they agonize over this to this day.
None of these women we know would be so flippant ant Tweeter-happy with news of a miscarriage and talk of abortion.
Whether you support abortion rights or not, we think we can all agree that abortion is something that should not be tweeted about…should not be treated so casually.
It really and truly chills us that someone did this.
We just don’t know what else to say but, WOW. What kind of person does that?
UPDATE:
It seems the woman who wrote this tweet about miscarriage/abortion has Asperger’s Syndrome — something we are very familiar with as our friend Sebastian used to live with a guy who had it (David), and we all had to deal with David on a regular basis. In essence, Asperger’s is a form of autism where a person is highly intelligent and functional, but that person has zero appreciation for the feelings of other people. ”Jokes” to an Asperger person can be cruel and highly inappropriate, because AS (Asperger’s sufferers) do not think about how their “jokes” come off to others…and don’t realize how awful the things they say can be. David, for instance, once ruined Thanksgiving dinner with friends by talking about how disgusting and gross he thought vaginas were. Everything that day reminded him of vaginas, from the turkey to the vegetables to the silverware. It was truly bizarre, and he just wouldn’t stop talking about vaginas. Sebastian had to take David outside and try to convince him no one thought he was funny and that he was making everyone uncomfortably. David insisted he was hilariously funny, and that what he was doing was “inspired comedy” because “of course the forks and spoons don’t look like vaginas, that’s why calling them vaginas is funny”. And he would then laugh hysterically over it.
The tweet about miscarriage/abortion is still vile…but if the woman who wrote it is AS, man alive does it make more sense now. That’s totally something David would have written too.
How do we know this?
Because David’s sister miscarried once and he — honest to goodness — said, “Well, now Myra doesn’t have to have that abortion she was saving up for”.
Jackass.
David’s family was so used to this garbage from him that they totally ignored it…but people who hadn’t lived with him for 30 years were always stunned at his callousness and insensitivity.
What was always worse, to us, was how he reveled in all this…he always seemed to take delight in making people uncomfortable. That’s just our take on it, but no matter how many times he was told that “people just don’t say things like this, David, and especially not at Thanksgiving dinner”, David just kept telling his “jokes” at every occasion.
He’s probably still pulling this crap somewhere right now, though none of us have talked to him in over two years now.
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Wasn’t too hard to find the offending twit, er, twitter.
http://twitter.com/penelopetrunk
I have no idea if it was real or not. Seems like a go getter to me. Follows 10,000 people and has 19,000 followers. Wow.
……. breathe……..
I am stunned. Abortion is a choice but it should be a very difficult one. It isn’t easy and shouldn’t be matter-of-fact flippant. Abortion should never be a form of birth control.
I am not for abortion but I do believe that it is a woman’s right to choose. I also am painfully aware that should my daughter ever be in a position I would support her if that was her choice. I would be sad for her as well.
To think that someone could or would tweet such a statement gives me chills. I hope I never cross paths with her.
I personally believe that there are circumstances in which the mother should have the choice to abort a child. Rape, incest-rape, and when it threatens the life of the mother.
Otherwise, abort simply is not an acceptable form of birth control
Such flippant disregard for human life is heartless, empty, and savage. The mark of the great society is not how it treats it’s poorest, but it’s most weak and defenseless.
I personally would never have an abortion and I would encourage my girls to keep their babies as well…having said that I really don’t think there is any need for gov’t involvement in this situation as well.
The best way to go about stopping casual abortions (ones NOT of the variety spoken of above) is to do it with education…the more people learn about the start of life and how much the fetus is growing (and how fast) in utero, the less likely people will be to do kill is to calously.
Then you let the free market take over and demand will go down, as will the supply.
That’s my .02.
Smart baby, decided to put everyone out of their misery…
There is a callousness; a total disconnect from reality with the Twit. Reality and karma can be real bitc#es…when they catch up with her.
Hope her ObamaCare plan carries really good counseling services…
I do follow Penelope Trunk’s blog. One thing that I think has been <A HREF="http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/09/29/this-weeks-series-how-to-deal-with-asperger-syndrome-at-work/ in this particular tweet: she has Asperger syndrome. It doesn’t excuse the callousness, but it does explain it.
Also, I apologize for mis-formatting a link above. Still need to work on my HTML tags.
Aspberger’s seems awfully close to being a sociopath. The difference in being that one gets an excuse for being “mentally challenged” and the other just “psychotic”.
Man, whenever something brings up Asperger’s we just flash back to how difficult life was with David around. Like that frog in the boiling water expression, when it was all happening and David was around all the time, we didn’t ever realize how difficult it was to deal with him. But, now, looking back, we don’t know how we did it.
In restaurants, David was always especially bad because there would be a pre-meal tantrum over the menu wherever we went. David could only eat chicken fingers, hamburgers, or omelettes. SOMETIMES pizza, but he would pick all the toppings off first, then eat the cheese, then scrape off the sauce and eat it with a spoon and then eat the pizza crust. Like a small child does.
If a restaurant didn’t have the three things David would eat, Sebastian would get up and ask a manager quietly if they could make it for him. He always made up a story like, “Oh, my boyfriend’s been in China for a year and he’s home now and suddenly got a craving for a burger. Can you please help him out and find a way to make one?”.
One time, at a dinner party, where the host made pot roast (so delicious) and David threw a fit, Sebastian asked the host if he could order David a small pizza so he would be happy. The host was a little insulted until Sebastian explained Asperger’s to her. Sebastian tipped the pizza guy a lot to get that there in record time. The rest of us sat at the table enjoying the roast while David munched on pizza like a diaper baby.
Every day was like that.
Geesh, just remembering it is exhausting.
Asperger’s is am autism disorder.