Twitter has been agog with a story which began when a daughter wanted some baked beans and her father, John Roderick —a.k.a. "Bean Dad"—told her to open a can and heat some up. But the nine year old girl had never used a can-opener.
Roderick decided not to show her
so she could figure it out for herself.
He told his daughter: "The little device is designed to do one thing: open cans. Study the parts, study the can, figure out what the can-opener inventor was thinking when they tried to solve this problem."
When the girl after six hours finally punctured the can she was triumphant. So was dad. Then the haters came — some labelling his actions child abuse.Then came the memes and the digging up of his prior tweets, some of which were indisputably racist and anti-Semitic.
On the face of it, this is the social media pastime of publicly second-guessing parenting decisions, writes Lenore Skenazy on Reason.com. "Once I read Bean Dad's past tweets I could very easily damn everything he did and said as cruel and reprehensible. It allowed me to label him, once and for all, as a jerk. I'm not sure that's something we should be doing whenever we're faced with an idea that is new or ambiguous. Digging back, hoping to find evidence of a character flaw so we can easily dismiss or despise someone, seems to allow us to hate instead of think."
