C stands for Confusion

I know about AEIOU and sometimes Y. In the English language, that’s our vowels. Y isn’t always a vowel, though, and it’s why there’s that little “sometimes” clause. Take the word YES. It’s a consonant. In the word GYM, it’s a vowel. That’s how it works.

Only a year or so ago, I was comfortable with LGBT because it was used almost exclusively by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual community (or is it communities?) I kinda got used to it and accepted it. I’m open-minded. Suddenly out of nowhere, the Q popped up. Huh? What the..? Oh, I see, the Q stands for Questioning or Queer. But it’s not always used. Is it LGBT and sometimes Q? I don’t know what’s right and I don’t want to offend anyone. Some use the Q and some don’t. OK, fine, but I’m not interested in looking up the differences between Q, L, and G.

Now, there’s the LGBTQIA community, which includes Intersex and Asexual people. According to the Urban Dictionary Website, “LGBTQIA is a more inclusive term than LGBT for people with non-mainstream sexual orientation or gender identity.” Oops! They didn’t include the Q. Is that considered politically incorrect?

As an H male, how am I supposed to keep up with these designations that change out of the blue, at a moment’s notice? There’s still Pansexual, Omnisexual, and Nonmonosexual to go, and I guess we can run the gamut from Ambisexual to Zensexual and everything in between, but with only 26 letters in the English language… what happens when the alphabet runs dry?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make myself a BLT, light on the M.  

Mike Plumadore, Big Daddy Fake Buster

Poor Tarah Souders. I feel terrible about what happened to her family and I’m not going to question what type of parent she is. In other words, I’m sure she loves her children more than anything in the world, but soon after her father became ill with emphysema, she had to downsize. Money was getting harder to come by, so she moved her three daughters and dear old dad into a ragtag trailer park in rural Indiana. She was aware that the small community held very, very real threats to her girls’ safety. She knew 15 registered sex offenders were the type of trash that lived there, but her own father assured her that all would be okay. Just before moving in, she mentioned two men in particular she was fearful of. One of them was 39-year-old Michael Plumadore. Her father reiterated his claim that no one would ever touch her children, especially Plumadore. So she decided to trust him.

What happened to Aliahna Lemmon was a real travesty, but it’s also a shame that grandpa didn’t live long enough to witness the inevitable; the murder of one of his grandchildren by the man he put so much faith in. Too bad he didn’t have the opportunity to find out the pretty, little, 9-year-old girl was dismembered and disposed of by the man he gave his blessing to; the one who bludgeoned her head with a brick. Too bad grandpa was a registered sex offender, just like Plumadore, and that they both had spent time together in jail. It was also a shame that Aliahna and her two sisters had been staying with Plumadore because mom had been too sick with the flu to care for them. Maybe she just needed a temporary break.

Why would a mother put her faith in any man who lived eons away from an exemplary lifestyle? Was she aware that daddy dearest was also a sexual deviant? Did she believe him because it takes one to know one? We may never know the answers, but common sense should have told her to stay miles away from that perverted playground for convicted child molesters. Who in their right mind would walk into a hornet’s nest of iniquity? With young girls?

For a woman who has her own Facebook account and some knowledge of the Internet, why didn’t it ever dawn on Tarah to look into the friend list of the man who confessed to killing her sweet daughter? In her time of grief, I’m sure she now realizes that she had no common sense or she would have known to look first. Any parent would do that, right?

Last night, I took a look at Plumadore’s Facebook page before it was taken down. What I saw were hundreds of impressionable young girls that made up a fair amount of his friend list. I didn’t have a chance to register each and every one of them in my mind, but a clear pattern emerged. The majority were young girls known as fake busters. Fake busters go after site models.

Fake busters and site models? Yes, and until last night, I didn’t know a thing about them. Site models, according to the Urban Dictionary description, are “average-looking girls who take pictures of themselves making kissy lips and peace signs and edit them excessively with Photoshop.”

“Someone who is insecure and unattractive and just wants other people to say that they’re good looking; someone who fishes for compliments but isn’t attractive enough to get them in person so they take pictures of themselves at indirect angles and over-edits them and uploads them to a site on myspace or facebook.”

Fake busters are trolls that go after site models. They, too, are mostly pre-teen and early teen girls and just like any other other Internet troll, their only mission is to “out” the site models for what they are not - world-class models, as if it’s anyone’s business. There is no difference between them and the trolls who go after anyone anonymously online. They are on a mission of empowerment. So one of them told me. Their goal is to rid the world of online people because they have nothing better to do. And they have certain things in common, like immaturity, low self-esteem and complete jealousy. Believe me, I have first-hand experience with trolls. I know how awful it is to have total strangers do everything they can to destroy someone they know nothing about. It’s lie after lie after lie. I also know how impressionable young people can be, especially girls. No sexism implied.

If only someone in the neighborhood - family and friends - had the insight to look into Plumadore’s past and Internet presence, they would have found a man obsessed with pre- and post-pubescent girls. I have no idea how he befriended most of them, but I saw scads and scads of them adding him to their list around the same time-frame, as if he was on a rampage for young and tender flesh. Who knows how he set them up… “I hate site models, just like you! Let’s go after them!”

His Facebook list of friends was 570 when I first saw it. How could the parents nearly 500 girls not know about this monster? Mr. Big Daddy Fake Buster, the grandest one of all!

If any school-age children were living in my household, you’d better believe I would know who they wanted to mingle with online, and until I could do a background check and whatever else I had available to research them, my children would not have permission to connect with anyone. Chat rooms would be SO off-limits. Period. I’m sure Tarah couldn’t afford a real background check, but she could have asked law enforcement what they knew about the men living in the neighborhood. I would be suspicious of any 39-year-old man, let alone asking or allowing him to babysit my children. And to be alone with little girls? In a deviant-infested trailer park? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s horrible that Tarah had to learn the hard way - to meet the police this way - but after all, her father, her own flesh and blood, assured her over and over again that no one would touch her girls. He must have been the scrupled one - the one who would never go after his own grandchildren.

Yeah, right. And I’ve got a nice mobile home you can live in for free. Plus, all the candy you can eat!

Pictures from Mike Plumadore’s Facebook account