Anonymous wrote:Dear Luis,
I hope that before you read this you will get a refreshing glass of water and walk out into nature.
You felt alone and isolated. You wanted to protect your daughter and the sanctity of competition. You looked for answers but were overcome by your emotions. How could you let your precious baby come face to face with something far from your control? You were helpless. Fight and flight took over, a human’s most basic instinctive response to an external threat.
So, you fought. You went for the jugular. You attacked quickly and fiercely. So much so that your emotions overcame your ability to be civil, thoughtful, and curious.
“Be curious, not judgmental.” Walt Whitman
In what is possibly one of your weakest public moments, you attacked a child. You thought you were protecting your own child. You weren’t. In that moment, you were attacking all of the children at the event. You projected your own fear onto the family of the child. You took your anger and fear and fought them with it.
And then you took that anger, the fear, the deep feelings of isolation that is one of the inherent struggles of parenting, and you used it to lash out on the very community that had welcomed you and your family for years. People that knew you and knew your beliefs, but it didn’t matter. You were family. It was your summer family.
One of the hardest things for humans is to reflect on their actions when it is overcome by shame. You feel shame. You think it is about the suspension but it’s not.
You know how you treated that child and your community was wrong. It is wrong. God forgives but first you must ask those you have hurt for forgiveness. Your actions must reflect those of someone seeking to rectify their wrongdoing.
Again, I encourage you, “Be curious, not judgmental.”
Provenance of the key quote notwithstanding, this is an empathetic and generous appeal. I would broaden it to anyone (including some dear friends of mine who I respect and value) who have become utterly committed to being and staying angry about this issue and expressing that anger in ways that range from unhelpful to (as in Mr. Fernandez's case) pathological.
May you give yourself grace for your actions, and seek forgiveness from all those you have inflicted pain on in an attempt to cover up your own moments of weakness.
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