Freddy Adu and his age truthers
They’re similar to the internet trolls calling Parkland survivors ‘crisis actors’
Andrew Helms’ VICE piece, “14-Year-Old Freddy Adu and the Age Truthers”, got me thinking. Here are some of my thoughts:
The fact that Freddy Adu had age truthers now seems prescient.
He was a teenager thrust into the national spotlight, burdened with otherworldly expectations. He was bound to have more than a few jealous detractors.
You can draw a few parallels between a young Adu and the Parkland, Florida students who now find themselves as the face for the national push for gun control. Adu was first accused of lying about his age by rival parents who didn’t like seeing their kids upended on the pitch. The Parkland students were first deemed crisis actors by right wing internet personalities who were threatened by the rise of empathic anti-gun activists.
Both Adu and the Parkland students were threats in the eyes of their rivals. And when someone is threatened, they’ll react defensively.
The only way for the parents to protect their kids was to trash Adu’s name, because it was impossible to stop him from trashing their kids on the field. And the only way for alt right trolls to wrestle the gun rights narrative away from the Parkland Shooting was to personally attacks the witnesses who were stoking the anti-gun activist fire.
Adu’s rise to fame was propelled by his natural talent while the Parkland students rose to national consciousness because of a tragedy, but their divergent paths to the public spotlight doesn’t make the ridicule they’ve faced any less inappropriate.
Although Adu made rival parents eat their words as he rose to the professional ranks before he turned 15, he wasn’t able to deal with the pressure of being the youngest professional athlete in the history of US sports.
On the other hand, although the verbal abuse the Parkland students continue to receive seems crueler than the hate spewed at Adu, the students seem more poised to deal with the adversity. The most probable reason being because they have the ability to control their own narrative.
When an internet troll, or even a right wing pundit, comes after one of them on Twitter, they’re perfectly positioned to bite right back. The current generation of high school students grew up on social media, after all.
Unlike Adu, their war is being waged on a battle field they know allllllll about.
Adu knew soccer, but how could a 14-year-old understand the nuances of professional soccer — especially in the pre-social media age?
As we all know, Adu’s career never really panned out. He couldn’t live up to the initial hype and failed to reinvent himself despite having played for 13 different teams from all over the world.
Here’s to the hope the Parkland students find more success than Adu and continue making their detractors squirm for a long time to come — both on social media and through public policy.
