I watched eleven seconds of it. That’s as far as I got.
Eleven seconds of my son at the worst moment of his week, with a stranger’s voice over the top doing an impression of the sounds he makes when his body betrays him, and underneath it four hundred comments from adults. Grown adults with jobs and kids and church pictures on their profiles, typing things about a nine-year-old.
Somebody wrote that the parents should be charged.
Somebody wrote that this is what happens when you let them out in public.
Somebody wrote that it was staged.
I sat on my bathroom floor at 7:30 in the morning with the door locked so Eli wouldn’t hear me, and I did the math on how long that video would exist. Forever, was the answer. It will outlive me. When Eli is forty and trying to get a job, that clip will be sitting on a server somewhere with his face in it.
