We are in the middle of a bus strike today over drivers wanting more pay during the Olympics and it’s raining in London so I thought I’d write about something I can only describe as “heartwarming”, and a prime example of the lack of borders and distances across our online community.
Karen Klein is a 68-year-old supervisor who works on the buses for Athena Middle School in a place called Greece, New York.
She had a particularly bad day earlier this week when a group of teenage boys started verbally abusing her and generally being horrible.
Karen stoically soldiered on with her job and her plight would have probably gone unnoticed, had not one of the teenagers posted a 10-minute video of the harassment on YouTube on Tuesday.
The video was brought to the attention of the local police and by the next day, as the video went viral, Karen had become a cause celebre.
Max Sidorov lives in Toronto and subscribes to reddit, the social news site where stories are posted by users. He read about Karen’s story and when he saw that her salary was only $15,506, he decided she didn’t make enough money to have to put up with that type of harassment.
Max decided to do something for Karen, a woman in a different country he had never met, and set up a page on indiegogo.com, the crowd funding site.
His aim: to raise $5,000 to send her on a good holiday – he wanted to raise enough “to get her away from the environment and get her on vacation somewhere.” That sum was raised in under 5 hours.
The amount currently stands at $446,177 with 29 days to go so there’s still time if you want to make a donation. You can have a look at the page HERE.
Karen’s experience struck an emotional chord and has initiated a world-wide debate on bullying and parenting. CNN commented her torment became a prism through which total strangers, the world round, characterized her experience as symbolic of everything wrong with modern-day parenting, children and more. Beyond anger, some expressed sadness for the seemingly defenseless older woman who, they felt, bravely suffered the slings and arrows flung at her for no good reason at all.
I bet those teenage boys have been given something to think about, and it must have restored Karen’s faith in human nature. Wonder where she will go on holiday?
