Steve Ouellette's Skateboarders Are Taking Over The Streets?

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There are many groups in our society today who are stereotyped, discriminated against, and look down upon. Almost every culture or race has a stereotype, but stereotypes are not just centered to different races and ethnic background. There are many other stereotypes that exist, including gender stereotypes, sexual orientation stereotypes, and many more. There are also small sub-culture groups that are targeted by stereotypes, such as skateboarders. Skateboarders are constantly being stereotyped and frowned upon by society because of their choice of self-expression. This is shown in the Press-Republican article titled Skateboarders Are Taking Over The Streets by Steve Ouellette, the skateboard-city.com article titled Why People Hate Skaters, …show more content…

This article is very opinionated, poisonous, and highly offensive to skateboarders. Ouellette is really just ranting throughout the whole article, about his hate for the actions of skateboarders. He begins his article with him stating that he doesn’t want to be the cranky old man that’s yelling “Hey! You kids, get off of my lawn!” but instead he yells “You skateboarders, get off of my road!” He says that he doesn’t have anything against skateboarding in general and that as a kid he owned a skateboard. He had one back when he was a child, when “the board was a skinny plank.” He also adds that one of his sons has a skateboard. He is very upset at the fact that skateboarders “show up at all hours of the day on virtually any street in the city, cruising causally down the middle of the road as if they were behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry.” He then states that, “Just having four wheels doesn’t make you a moving vehicle. [They] don’t have a bumper, a seat belt, [or] an airbag. [He] is sure [that they] don’t have collision insurance. He makes a not-so-funny about how he has run over almost six skateboarders in the past couple of years. Four of them were by accident. He complains about how they wont move, even when they are approached by a car. He uses a stereotype by saying that skateboarders don’t see that they’re in his way because they are too busy guzzling Red Bull. He goes on to state that he does not understand the appeal of the skateboard as transportation and that skateboarders should just get a bike. Ouellette makes another sarcastic remark, he says “sure, a skateboard has other uses, it can be used as a clubbing weapon, especially during a zombie apocalypse, it can be a personal picnic table, a bridge over a very small stream, an emergency flotation device and a Lazy Susan for the Thanksgiving table.” He insists

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