A Quick Note
Hello,
I wanted to take a quick moment to address an issue some of you may have seen on my Twitter feed on Thursday night. I have no desire to be the moral police, certainly not in the realm of internet decorum or Twitter usage, and I have no idea why this instance affected me the way it did- but it did. I politely asked a top prospect to delete a tweet in which he used a racial slur. He isn’t a Texas prospect, but I’d have done the same thing had he been. He initially refused on account of him being called the word in the original tweet that had been sent to him. In 3 separate tweets over a 5 hour span, I asked him to delete the word. When he begrudgingly relented, he sent me “the tweets gone now delete all your stupid tweets trying to get people in trouble”. I told him that had I wanted to get him in “trouble”, I would have retweeted his ignorance to 900 people or sent a message to someone from his team’s front office. Or I could have written a piece about how Twitter and social media is sometimes too much for young people to handle with regards to what they share and type. And I could use him as an example. I am not going to do that. I reminded him that he wants to play in the same league Jackie Robinson played in, and I told him that I hope one day he meets Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. My final correspondence from him was “delete all your prior tweets. Everyone reads all these. Mine will be deleted ASAP”. I have no idea if he realizes that it’s a bad idea for anyone, much less a public figure, to use that word, ever. I’m deleting all my correspondence with him this morning.
I don’t mean to be such a sanctimonious pain-in-the-ass, but it really annoyed me that he a) typed that word in the first place and b)was too prideful/ignorant to realize its power. I’m just here to have a good time and I don’t stand for much, but I’ll stand for that.
Sorry for being so preachy. Thanks for reading. Enjoy baseball. Love Ya!
-Tepid
tepid participation 