Whitney Gregory turned her son into a menace to society.
No, she didn't teach 12-year-old Jeffrey how to vandalize, steal, assault people or torture puppies and kittens. She told him to do something done by nearly all boys his age in his milieu--in a different place from where he'd been doing it before.
Susan Garcia felt so threatened by it. The Homeowners Association member in Santa Ana, California--no doubt motivated by the possible threat to her property value as well as her corporeal security--yelled at the boy and pushed him.
His mother probably taught him not to respond violently. If that was enough to get Martin Luther King Jr. arrested more times than he could count, it was more than sufficient to escalate Ms. Garcia's ire.
"Please don't touch me," he pleads with her.
She smacked him. "Why did you just hit me?" he asks.
Being a master of the Socratic and Talmudic methods of inquiry, she responded with a question, "Want me to hit you again?"
Jeffrey's parents came out of their house at that point. Not surprisingly, given the lessons they taught their boy, they de-escalated the situation and sent Jeffrey into their house.
So what did his mother tell him to do that so threatened Ms. Garcia?
She told him to ride his bicycle on the sidewalk.
Now, to you, dear reader, and to me, that may seem misguided. But Ms. Gregory, being the concerned mother she is, told Jeffrey to ride on the sidewalk because when he rode on the street, he almost was hit by a car. Were I not a cyclist myself, I might do the same for my kid.
I have to wonder, though, about what lessons Jeffrey Gregory has learned from the incident. Actually, I don't. You see, even though I have always had an independent spirit (for which I've been praised and scolded), as a kid--even at his age--I obeyed my parents, and most authority figures, to the degree that I could. And that is why, by that time in my life, I'd learned that at some point, doing what my parents, or some other adult, told me to do could get me into trouble with some other adult. And, of course, as an adult, you can obey the law and still get arrested or do whatever is expected of you and get into some kind of trouble.
All I can hope is that Jeffrey doesn't give up bicycle riding--and that he's not too emotionally scarred--as a result of an encounter with a woman who saw him as a menace--for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk.
