Public space behaviour – a disturbing pattern

I heard a father in Kent Road Park, Dunkeld, earlier this week behave in an unnecessarily hostile manner with kids in the cricket nets, who he felt were not giving his son 'a chance' in their (not his) cricket game. This afternoon, in Delta Park, Blairgowrie, another father threatened a picnicking family because they politely asked his daughter not to throw her ball near their food. Her dad actually threatened to beat up the father of that family, there and then. Yelling, 'You don't speak to my daughter – you speak to me!' Later in the afternoon, a third and different father then threatened my driver when a soccer ball that he and two little boys were playing with, in all innocence, narrowly missed the guy's daughter. Said, 'You're very lucky….if that ball had hit her….'

All three fathers were white and Afrikaans-speaking. Is this coincidental? What is this? Maybe such dads should stay away from public parks and facilities if they can only think in a physically threatening and socially unacceptable way. They're giving warm, hospitable, sociable Afrikaans-speaking people a bad press. Please stop it already!

Comments

[Craig]

Unacceptable public behaviour assaults me from the second I hit the road in the morning and continues until I get home at night. Taxi drivers on the road, political leaders on the radio, stressed-out work colleagues and my own occasional rants all add to what I experience as a mounting national rage. We are stressed. Where is the relief-valve for this nation? I ask not in abdication, but in sometime-despair.

[angela mcclelland]

I've experienced the same thing and am not someone who backs down. These people have not been properly socialised and need to go to puppy training school or get put down.