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The Internet Is Losing Its Shit Over Moms Losing Their Shit at Skate Parks

The narrative of a suburban mother with an axe to grind at the quarter pipe seems to have stuck with the internet.

They're tax-paying citizens, they're freaking the fuck out, and they're having a bit of a moment. Some are even calling it the new American trend: grown-ass women, snapping at skate parks.

Click over to this subreddit devoted specifically to videos of people going shithouse at skate parks, and you'll find, at least at the time of this writing, that the majority of the uploads happen to feature adult females, presumably mothers. (Some make it very clear they are, in fact, moms.)

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The nascent community is a spinoff of r/publicfreakout— which you should go to immediately, if you're looking for a real K-hole plunge into the entitlement and downright assholery of a huge swatch of the sub/urban human condition—and is already a telling case study on authority and the diffusion of responsibility in public spaces, like skate parks.

Now, humans have been having good, old-fashioned public freakouts for about as long as we've had the ability to outwardly express frustration and anger, which is to say pretty much as long as we've been around. And while the aforementioned publicfreakout subthread is teaming with jerky cell phone footage of jacked bros going ape on hapless citizens, the narrative of a suburban mother with an axe to grind at the quarter pipe seems to have stuck with the internet.

So, why are moms freaking out at skate parks anyway? Because some goddamn skater dude ran right into her kid:

Again, this time with bikes:

Here's a slow-burn variation on that theme.  The lead up is important for context, but the action begins at around the 2:15 mark:

Other times, it's because someone was cursing like a sailor:

Still other times, it's about teaching the "corporate ass motherfuckers" a lesson:

Then again, it's not always so clear cut. At least not in all of these instances. What's clear is that each of these videos (the result of a five-minute search) has its own set of circumstances, its own set of characters and events that took place before or after the camera rolled.

Should the mom in the very first clip, where she sticks that dude right in the side of the face, have let her kid run unattended around the park? Probably not. And it's certainly not like the brats in the last clip, directly above, helped matters by insulting the women. Hell, I'd publicly freakout on them if I were her, too.

You get the idea. None of it's black and white. There are no winners.

In other news, people still skate?