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Palin drama? Small potatoes compared to violence against women, kids

Sitting down to write this column, I had a lead in mind: A funny thing happened on the way to the trailer park the other night. Alaska's former first family piled out of a stretch Clampettmobile at a party and stumbled -- proud, rowdy, middle fingers defiantly flying -- headlong into national headlines. Again.

It would have continued: Voices were raised. Punches thrown. Alcohol -- no, say it ain't so! -- was involved. Perhaps as important, a sick, spellbinding celebrity was involved, too.

Thinking for a few moments about that sick celebrity is why that particular column is not going to be written. In the vast scheme of things, who cares what Sarah Palin or her family do? It does not matter how much they embarrass Alaska or themselves. They are cheap entertainment. We will forgive them. That is what we do with celebrities. We forgive. We make excuses.

The Minnesota Vikings and Adrian Peterson are a case in point. As a Green Bay Packers fan, I recognize the Vikings are the antithesis of everything decent or good, but watching Peterson -- indicted in Texas for reckless or negligent injury to a child -- run with a football is to enjoy the best being the best. He is magical, a force of nature, a game-changer. More important to the Vikings, he is a franchise player.

When it was learned he had, in his own words, used a switch, or tree branch, to whip his 4-year-old son, raising welts, drawing blood and leaving bruises, and damning pictures showing all that emerged, the team benched him for last Sunday's game -- and promptly lost.

Stung, the Vikings did the unforgivable. The team reversed field, reinstated Peterson and sparked a furor. "We felt it was in the best interests of the organization to step back, evaluate the situation, and not rush to judgment," the team said. It was enough to make a maggot retch.

The Radisson hotel chain immediately yanked its club sponsorship. Anheuser-Busch -- which pours tens of millions of dollars into the National Football League -- said it was "disappointed and increasingly concerned" by the "league's handling of behaviors that so clearly go against our own company culture and moral code."

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Money talks and the admonition jarred the NFL, whose players are role models for kids, whether the front office likes it or not. The league already was buried in the smarmy fallout from Ravens rusher Ray Rice punching out his fiancée's lights in a hotel elevator, and new cases pop up almost daily.

Despite the obvious -- that whipping a 4-year-old bloody with a tree branch is abuse -- some defend Peterson's actions, laying them off on Southern, or even black, culture. Everybody does it; it is old-fashioned parenting, they will tell you.

Defenders include luminaries such as the Detroit Lions' Reggie Bush, who says he would "harshly" punish his 1-year-old daughter if necessary, and Charles Barkley, who explained Peterson's actions to sportscaster Jim Rome on CBS: "I don't know where he's from. I'm from the South. Whooping -- we do it all the time. Every black parent in the South is going to be in jail under those circumstances."

I'm from the South. I used to get the stuffing "whooped" out of me routinely. A switch. Belts. A hairbrush. Anything at hand. (A heavy brush was pressed into service in many instances, so many that when I happened upon that brush a few years back, I started shaking. I could not touch it.) The takeaways from the "spankings"? A fierce anger, fear, molten resentment. Discipline? Hardly.

Beating kids and punching women is not a Southern thing or a black thing. It is an anger thing, a frustration thing, a weakness thing. It is an "I'm out of ideas" thing. It is domination. It is learned behavior. More than all that, it is intellectually, morally wrong. If you need to whip a child bloody or beat a woman, if your first response is violence, you are a sick puppy.

The NFL has a problem. This nation has a problem. Alaska has a problem. Men -- and women, too -- need to keep their hands to themselves.

Somewhere, there is an answer to why people beat kids and each other. Whatever it is, it will hinge on personal responsibility and start in the home.

Until we can sort that out, until we get it right, who cares about the Palins?

Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorgeDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com

Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

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