by John Boch

So I get a call this morning after the horrific tragedy in Dallas.  The caller hails from St. Louis.

On the other end of the phone is a 17-year-old suburban kid.  He came across as very articulate and well-spoken with pinch of desperate.

He’s also become quite famous, thanks to the tweet he sent out last night following the Black Lives Matter terror attack that claimed the lives of five Dallas police officers and wounded seven more.

Here’s what he tweeted:

@barrybateman wtf! Is when whites think their superior than us! Dallas must burn,black lives matter now, got the message pigs!

In not even 24 hours, this 17-year-old’s life has made a turn for the worse thanks to a moment of monumentally poor decision-making.

He rattled off several things that have happened in the past few hours.  The police have visited him.  He’s already been suspended for the first two weeks of school.  He’s worried this may have wrecked his future with that one tweet.

I confirmed that this was indeed his tweet. He admitted it freely,  eager for me to take it down.

I asked:  “What possessed you to write that, as though you were a black person when you sound like a white, suburban kid?”

He said it was stupid.  Really stupid.

“I’m just a stupid, really left-wing white suburban dumbass,” he said (or something very close to that as I wasn’t taking notes).  Then he trotted out some flimsy excuse that he’s been taking pain meds following the removal of his wisdom teeth and not himself lately.

Yes, I laughed out loud.

The goodwill he’d netted in the previous couple of minutes just evaporated.  My wisdom teeth removal (yes, kid, you’re not the first person to have that procedure or the meds) was complicated by a bone fragment that got missed.  I tripled up on my Vicodins just to take the edge off for two weeks.   I didn’t advocate violence in writing or in person – and I lawfully carried at the time.

I suggested he rid himself of anything and everything in his life related to that Twitter handle and consider penance to his local law enforcement agency.

I Googled his tweet and it’s out there, so pulling it down from GSL isn’t going to gain him any traction at burying his immature and hurtful actions.

Young man:  Police officers and their families are grieving for the loss of these officers in Dallas.  They had families, children and loved ones, and now they are gone.  Other families have been devastated with potentially life-threatening and certainly life-changing injuries that they may not survive.  Your poorly-considered tweet further adds inflammatory energy to this issue, potentially even risking peoples’ lives.  Indeed, if your tweet is the catalyst for a copycat attack elsewhere in America, you will indeed have blood on your hands.  I do sincerely hope that you have learned a valuable lesson.

I do hope other teens learn and consider the potentially long-reaching implications before they post stupid things on social media.  In fact, I suspect this will make it into our Personal Protection for Teens class coming up as a life lesson on what not to do.

The young man is welcome to post as he wishes in comments.  (Sir, you may use a pseudonym and I don’t recommend your old Twitter handle.  We don’t publish email addresses.).

Not what it seems

What’s more, it just goes to show how what you read online may or may not be the real deal from a real deal person.  Here’s a white suburban teenager pretending to be an aggrieved black person, advocating violence and anarchy. It just goes to show that things you read on the Internet aren’t always what they seem from whom they seem.

Need another example?  I once knew a guy who provided sex and relationship advice on a couple of online forums.  He had no formal education in that field, hadn’t had a date in fifteen years and his first wife shot and killed herself.

Moral of that story:  Be careful who you take advice from.