I don’t know if people have alternative news sources that they are following, but I notice a large part of the discussion here is premised on the idea that the cashier was a teenager. The article doesn’t mention the cashier’s age aside from a description of the cashier as a “young man” by Burns. Maybe it’s a bit because the name of the cashier isn’t mentioned, and that makes us assume they are being protected because of their youth?
But it makes me think of people called Don Jr. a “young man” when Jr. did something wrong at some point in the Trump presidency. Young men make mistakes. What qualifies you as a young man, though, seems to depend on your skin colour and wealth more than on your age. I feel like assuming this was youthful stupidity as opposed to hard-baked hate is part of the system that reinforces this behaviour.
As easy as it is to imagine a young person doing something stupid for basically no reason, it’s also extremely easy to imagine a person who enjoys bullying people, regularly attacks people with racist, homophobic and sexist slurs, and who has never suffered any consequences for doing so because their actions were written off as youthful stupidity.
(And honestly even if this was a fourteen-year-old who feels very sorry and embarrassed about what they did now, it’s good they feel sorry and embarrassed)
