Something I think many people miss much of the time when they look at a social media explosion like Bean Dad and write it off as a huge amount of noise about something silly is that the noise happens because it’s actually hitting a much bigger and very raw issue.

There are so, so many people saying that their own parents did this to them and it genuinely hurt them in ways that have lasted decades. That they are still angry about it.

They aren’t hypersensitive, they were kids and an adult fucked with them. That leaves a mark.

If this wasn’t A Social Problem, would so many people be talking about it from such a personal place?

Sometimes people pile on because of dopamine pings and that’s not ideal, but sometimes people pile on because they’re hurt and that hurt has been reactivated.

So you don’t share that hurt. Maybe consider that it’s legitimate. Do you have similar old hurts? Have you ever “overreacted” because someone hit an old raw place? You know you have.

We all have. It’s a human thing. It’s worth listening to and having compassion for, and if you don’t think so, please consider why, because part of it is having compassion for yourself rather than dismissing your own feelings.

When this many people are upset because someone did something similar at a formative age that *hurt them*, and they have been gaslit their entire lives into believing the problem was them, maybe let’s consider how to keep children from feeling this way.

The fact is that we as a society do not treat children very well. We dismiss them, we belittle their powerful feelings, we fetishize their innocence while neglecting to truly protect them, and we pretend they aren’t entering a truly horrific and bleak world.

And sometimes those of us who do love them and mean well and want to do right by them do something really hurtful and shitty to them, because dead angles exist and probably because some adult once did something similar to them.

So let’s talk about that and try to stop it.

Someone did something similar to us*

Noisy outrage social media exists. Sometimes people just want to be part of the noisy outrage. But that isn’t always what’s going on, and we owe it to each other to be careful about how we evaluate it.