Who remembers the Church Lady?
As Arnold Horshack would have said, “oooh, oooh, I do.”
I loved the Church Lady, played so brilliantly by comic Dana Carvey on “Saturday Night Live.” He/she had a way of leveling her pompous guests (either real or played by the show’s actors) with a quick verbal punch to the chops.
“My,” Carvey would say, “we love ourselves, don’t we?” Or, when one of the guests said something so pompous or ridiculous it left normal people speechless, Church Lady would simply contort her mouth and say, “well, isn’t that special.”
I wish she was still around today. She’d fit right in with the current cast, which seems to have been given a resounding breath of fresh air, with all the lampooning they do of President Trump and his administration.
There was room for only one judgmental person on her show, and that was her. No one else needed to apply. And she’d cut anyone who tried right down to size.
I suspect Church Lady made a lot of people uncomfortable, because there’s no shortage of judgmental people in this world. As former president George W. Bush — of whom I certainly was not a fan — said last week, we judge other groups by their worst example.
I’ll do him one better. We do not cut anyone any slack. And, as Bush alluded in that speech last week, every one of us would ask for the same slack we routinely and smugly deny everyone else.
A rather nasty little episode that happened last week illustrates this perfectly. The daughter of the proprietor of the White Rose Coffeehouse in Central Square got loose on social media and by the time she was done, she’d viciously and unnecessarily savaged the Lynn Police. She did what most people loaded with self-righteous indignation and missing whatever button it is that would guide normal people to keep opinions such as hers to themselves. She popped off.
Her remarks were unconscionable and regrettable.
Predictably (and I don’t say this to criticize), Facebook and other social media outlets lit up as people shared the posts and vowed they’d boycott the White Rose. it proved too much for owner Kato Mele, who put a lock on the doors and walked away. Even though she fired her daughter, the backlash did not relent.
This is what happens in our society today. Someone says something inappropriate or worse, and we get up on our hind legs and boy, do we revel in the self-righteous indignation. We can’t get enough of it. And we’re not happy until everyone involved, however peripherally, is groveling in the dirt begging for forgiveness or run out of town. And self-appointed keepers of the morality keys always seem to get their way, too.
So Kato Mele, who was not the person who got on social media and posted anti-police comments, is gone. Run out of town by people who seem to feel there is no connection between the invective they spew and the people who end up broken and defeated by the sheer force of the fusillade.
So here’s the timeline. Daughter trashes police; mother fires daughter and invites police to her establishment so they can talk about it; police choose to forego the offer (no shock, and no surprise either); people bombard the owner, twisting the knife in as deeply as possible by questioning her parenting skills; owner finally throws up her hands and closes the establishment.
The minute the daughter pilloried the police, Kato Mele’s life was going to be made miserable. It would be a cold day in Hades before any police officer was going to darken the White Rose’s door.
Without any help from the self-appointed morality police, this woman was probably going to be doomed. It’s tough to recover from that kind of a barrage.
But what about the rest of us? What about all the people who sent her emails, texts and Facebook posts, and threatened her?
There was no justification for what Sophie CK, the 23-year-old daughter in question, put online. But there’s also no justification for what a lot of other people did.
We seem to have this insatiable need to be outraged. Whether the anger is directed toward politicians, publications or comedians whose material wades deeply into governmental waters. It’s not enough to disagree anymore. We go right to being outraged.
Folks, we have to stop this. We can’t be charging up every hill like Teddy Roosevelt. The police are capable of defending themselves and speaking for themselves. Chief Michael Mageary actually did what leaders are supposed to do: He tried to play it down and dissuade people from going into extreme outrage mode.
If we dislike the president (and whoever the president IS is going to have that privilege) we get on him for everything, big or small. He makes an innocent slip of the tongue, the way Barack Obama visited 57 states, or when Donald Trump talked to the president of the Virgin Islands, and we act as if he walked into a church with a full metal jacket and began firing. Where is that gene that forces people to stop themselves and contemplate the notion that not everything needs to provoke “outrage.”
While there are certainly consequences for saying intemperate things, and Sophie CK certainly did that, going after her mother with such vengeance was a little too much.
As Kato Mele said, “I’ve lost my daughter and I’ve lost my business.” That’s what you call losing it all. This piling on that seems to be going with it is cruel. Please, let’s stop it.