Have I No Heart?

All right, America, I have to ask you the kind of question that, just by me asking, reveals me as some kind of thoughtless, horrible person.

I’ve listened to the tape of Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter and I just have to ask, “What the the fuck is so outrageous about this?”

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I get that you’re not supposed to call your kid names and you’re not supposed to talk to them in a vaguely menacing tone. But I swear to god, last night on MSNBC, they were analyzing this thing like he was threatening to fly to L.A. and beat the shit out of her.

You see what I’m saying? I get why what he’s doing is wrong; I just don’t get why it’s outrageous.

He sounds pissed off and hurt and he executed very, very poor judgment in calling her a pig.

And I don’t want to sound dismissive of that, but please. I’m related to people whose dad knocked them down the stairs for fun. Anyone who knows kids in the foster system can tell you horror stories about what parents do to their kids.

Those things rarely make the news.

And yet, Baldwin loses his temper with a kid who’s across the country from him, who won’t even talk to him, and we’re all supposed to sit around and tut tut over how he’s doing irreparable damage to her?

Maybe this just tells you something about how I was raised, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why the news thinks I should find his behavior worth gasping in shock over.

Do people really have families where the parents never majorly fuck up?  Where this kind of behavior is utterly foreign to them?