It’s been eight months, or roughly 37 billion news cycles, since Amy Cooper made headlines. If you’ve forgotten the name already, Amy Cooper is the New Yorker who went viral when she was caught on camera yelling at a black guy in Central Park for telling her to keep her dog leashed. He got her on video calling the police to make a false report that he was attacking her. And to make it even weirder, his name is Christian Cooper, and they’re in no way related and apparently had never met before this fateful moment.
Nobody came out of this incident smelling like a rose. Amy Cooper shouldn’t have lied to the cops, and Christian Cooper shouldn’t have messed with somebody else’s pet. They’re both jerks and they both escalated the situation. But she’s the one who committed an actual crime, and he was justified in calling it racist. There are way too many race hoaxes out there, but this wasn’t one of them.
Well, if you were angry about Amy Cooper last May, now you have a reason to get angry all over again. Lia Eustachewich, NY Post:
Misdemeanor charges were dismissed Tuesday against Amy Cooper — the so-called “Central Park Karen” who falsely accused a black birdwatcher of “threatening” her — after she completed a handful of therapy sessions.
She had faced up to a year in prison on a single charge of falsely reporting an incident in the third degree.
Instead, a judge granted Manhattan prosecutors’ request to toss Cooper’s case after she completed five therapy sessions “designed for introspection and progress,” Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon at a brief virtual hearing.
A year in jail seems pretty harsh. Maybe that’s racist of me — Hey, what isn’t? — but a year seems like too much. Is this punishment too lenient, though? She underwent, and I quote, “psychoeducation and therapy services which focused on the ways in which Ms. Cooper could appreciate that racial identities shape our lives but we cannot use them to harm ourselves or others…”
And now I find myself wondering what “psychoeducation” entails. Was it some sort of A Clockwork Orange thing? Did they prop her eyelids open and make her watch Martin on BET until she found it funny? Did they show her pictures of black people and then give her an electric shock every time she lunged for her phone to dial 911?
Seriously, though, it sounds like they think her real crime wasn’t making a false police report, but being a racist. If so, how are a few “psychoeducation” sessions going to change that?
Should this incident follow Amy Cooper around for the rest of her life? Should she be dogged by something stupid she did while walking her actual dog? Hasn’t she learned her lesson after being shamed by the entire world?
Christian Cooper has forgiven her, saying “she’s already paid a steep price.” He’s gotten over it. He found enough grace in his heart to forgive her. Why can’t you?
Just kidding. It’s 2021, and forgiveness is for the weak. If you catch somebody being racist, you must hound them until the day they die. If you don’t, that means you’re a racist too. The same goes for sexism, ageism, transphobism, and every other -ism. And so on, and so on, until the whole world is just one big witch hunt.
And nobody’s immune. You’re not free of sin just because you live on the Upper West Side. Hell, that guy at the NYT got fired for saying a bad word a year ago, regardless of the context. When libs run out of real enemies, they start eating their own.
Who needs Big Brother when you’ve got millions of Little Sisters?
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