What kind of half-hearted, pea-hearted, dark-hearted, miserable, cowardly fool would write something like that.
What kind of small-minded, harebrained, boneheaded member of AFL society would be weak and hateful enough to post what was posted about Eddie Betts.
They’re not questions. They’re incredulous statements of fact. Betts’s former Adelaide teammate Ben Davis summed up the entire racism issue in two sentences.
“What the f..k is wrong with people,” he wrote. “What’s so hard to get ???”
Agreed. We get it more deeply than ever. George Floyd and then Black Lives Matter and then a spotlight on indigenous Australia and then AFL players taking a knee. We get it.
I remember having a crack at Latrell Mitchell when he kept calling out the racism he copped on Twitter and Instagram and various other homes of the haters. Various other publishing houses for the prejudiced. Now I’d replace “suck it up” with “keep it up”. I was a bit naive about his wounds. I grew up on a surfboard, a tennis court and a cricket pitch. I never witnessed racism towards someone I knew, because I did not know any indigenous kids. They just didn’t do the things I did.
In adulthood, in this job, I have met plenty. I doubt I have ever really understood their position. I thought Mitchell should not take the moronic posts about him to heart. Ignore the bigots. Don’t give them the time of day. If he did not want to be trolled on social media, I suggested he should simply get off social media. Problem solved. Now I’d view it differently. Now I’d take a knee before work if the bosses wanted me to.
None of us probably get it unless we have lived it, heard it, had our heart hurt by it. As Carlton co-captain Sam Docherty said on Monday: “I can’t understand what that does to Eddie, and I never will — and I don’t think any of us will, that don’t go through that.”
Good on Mitchell for outing the racists. Good on Betts, too, for taking it on. For repeating the chimpanzee picture, seemingly posted by an Essendon supporter, and writing: “If at any time anyone is wondering why we work so hard to bring attention to the importance of stamping out racism, this is it. If ever there was a time where our focus on this needs to continue more than ever, it’s now. We each have a responsibility to ourselves and each other. To continue to listen. To learn. To educate. To ignore it is to be part of the problem, to call it out is to be part of the solution.”
Kevin Pietersen asked this recently: is social media doing more harm than good? My knee-jerk response was yes. All the whingeing and moaning and groaning and criticising and tut-tutting and pontificating is either nasty or just plain boring. But Betts’s move on Sunday made me think social media is good. Before, if he was vilified, he would have copped it on his own. Now, he tells us all about it, and he is enveloped in the sort of embrace that has power without the physicality. Part of me still thinks anyone half-witted enough to post that trope about Betts is best ignored. But that part of me is getting smaller. The only shame is that in outing the culprit, Betts was unable to properly out him. Name and number, et cetera. You would hope Essendon took it from there, finding the bloke, kicking him to the kerb.
I wanted to get hold of the guy. Not to knock his block off. What would that prove? That I was as angry as him! I wanted to ask him why he would post what he posted. Serious question. Why do that? Bad day at work? Trouble in the personal life? Some other cause of angst that made you cold enough to lash out at Betts? He hardly had the strength of his convictions. His Twitter handle when the hate was in his fingertips was @M2Aussie. The name attached to the account was Brett Mitchum. The Twitter handle was changed to @brett_dons. What started as dumb was fast getting dumber. He posted a photo of the Essendon team, clearly the club he supported. I doubted he was smart enough to be throwing us off the scent. With the vaguely hopeless feeling of someone shooting an arrow at the sky and hoping it will hit the moon, I sent old mate a question: “Re Eddie Betts. Why would you post that? Serious question.”
He had removed himself from Twitter. Pathetic. By then Betts has received so much support, and so many people had told Mitchum that they were coming for him, that there was only one winner. Betts. For every snivelling piece of support for Mitchum — stay strong brother, that sort of rot — there were a hundred more saying it was wrong. Yes, social media had given a chauvinist his whimpering little voice. What a shame. But social media had given Betts and the rest of us the opportunity to call him out. There was the victory. The pea-heart ran away. Betts and Carlton might not have agreed … but they finally had a win. To both Betts and Mitchell: keep it up.
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