Good day all. After yesterday’s panic restore of images and plugins, it looks like all is right with the world…Unless you’re an 11 year old girl in Massachusetts who was cited for trespassing when walking to her school bus.
No, I am not joking. It seems an 11 year old was cutting through people’s backyards to get to her bus, and instead of talking to her or to her parents, some idiot property owners called the police and had her cited. Here are the details from Fox News:
A sixth-grader in Massachusetts was served by police with no-trespass orders after neighbors grew wary of the girl cutting through their properties to get to and from her school bus stop. The mother of 11-year-old Autumn Blanchard told the Cape Cod Times her daughter received three pink no-trespass notices from the Harwich Police Department on March 2.
Krystal Blanchard said she was unaware neighbors had an issue until the police arrived at her door and asked why she wasn’t informed by the neighbors or school officials, who also knew about the problem.
“I am beyond distressed by this situation,” she told the newspaper. “I can’t imagine why it had to go to this level. Someone should have spoken to me.”
That would involve your neighbors actually having a functioning brain. However, this is Massachusetts, and Harwich is dead center of Kennedy Country. In order to live there, you generally need to have a hemispherectomy, on both sides of the brain.
According to the notices, Autumn could be arrested and fined up to $100, imprisoned up to 30 days or both, if she steps onto the properties listed in the no-trespass orders.
Do they really want to deal with the publicity of locking up an 11 year older for something like this? I’m sure that the slamming the Harwich PD is getting over the citation is bad enough. I wonder what actually set this off, and it appears that Autumn’s mother is wondering as well.
Blanchard said she wonders if the fact her family is new to the area and she and her daughter have brightly colored hair may be causing neighbors to discriminate against them. The mother has pink hair and piercings, while her daughter’s hair has multiple colors.
“That’s the only thing I can think of, which I think is ridiculous,” said Blanchard, who contends Autumn is a “nice, polite kid.”
Oh I agree. This is stupid. What this tells me is that the local snobs got all bent out of shape that some peon dared to cross over their property. Since they didn’t want to dirty themselves by actually speaking with the little urchin, or her low born mother, they decided to unleash the local storm troopers.
Harwich Police Chief David Guillemette blamed a “breakdown in communication” for the situation in an interview with the newspaper. He said police should have met first with the mother to discuss her daughter’s trespassing.
“I would have preferred it would have been handled with more tact,” Guillemette said.
A neighbor told the paper she was previously sued because a girl fell in her yard, and became concerned when she saw Autumn climbing over debris from a fallen tree.
Do you want to know how to deal with that situation? It’s actually very simple. When you see a child doing something like this and you don’t approve, you go out and you speak to him or her. You don’t yell, you don’t intimidate them and you don’t make threats. You find out why he or she is doing this, and then you ask them not to and explain why.
I know of what I speak. How do I know? When I bought the Anger Central Primary Dwelling years ago, I spotted a boy, about the same age as this young lady slipping through my fence to cut across my property to get to a friends house. I went outside, politely stopped him and asked that he not do this for his own safety. (There was broken glass in places that I needed to clean up) The young man explained that the previous owners had let him do this, and while I was sympathetic, I explained to him about the broken glass and what could happen if he got hurt. He was also polite, (Obviously, a well brought up young lad), and we shook hands and I escorted him to the street, chatting with him.
No police were involved, no screaming, no yelling none of this “Get off my lawn!” stuff. I didn’t even need to find the parents. This is how you deal with children doing things you don’t want. But then, I was raised in New Hampshire where we actually talk to our neighbors. Now, the Massholes of Harwich are about to discover the true meaning of the “Streisand Effect.” It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
[yasr_visitor_votes size=”large”]
You were doing fine until you had to end with a reference to that miserable witch from Hollyweird that is almost as annoying as Shrillary and that Rachel Mad Cow.
In this case, it doesn’t actually refer to Barbara Streisand, only the effect named after her. Sort of like the Munroe Effect is named after Charles Munroe. 🙂
Unlike Mr. Munroe, I suspect that “Babs” would like to forget how the effect named after her came into being. 😉