Social Media Challenge: Ugly Baby

Social Media Challenge: Ugly Baby   (E) Written for "The Writer's Cramp" August 10, 2019 856 Words #2197853 by Chris Breva

856 Words

Prompt: "Write about the next "social media challenge" (examples from the past include the planking challenge and the ice bucket challenge). Make it as realistic or unrealistic as you like!"

I know an ugly baby contest is probably not new. I am not going for originality here. For one thing, it is still early in the morning and my narcoleptic brain is still half asleep. However, I know we have all been in that awkward situation. Somebody gives birth to a baby that is so ugly it barely appears human. Of course the parents are proud of it and we want to compliment them for having such a lovely baby. One part of you wants to be honest and ask "Did the mother breed with a creature from outer space to produce this?"

What we do in reality is coo and say "Oh, what a handsome child! How beautiful!"

Well I recently met a couple who told me their baby was butt ugly. I of course was trying to be nice and compliment them, but the baby was so ugly it made one wonder if the doctor had thrown away the baby and kept the placenta! The parents knew the kid was ugly. I mean this child had a pointed head, a flat nose, mismatched eyes, was as pale as it could be even though she was an African American child, underweight, and generally screwed up. The child was so ugly she was cute! We've all seen the type. They have a face that Godzilla would be scared of! This little girl was homely!

Her parents suggested that we enter her in an ugly baby contest on social media so we took pictures and hoped the camera did not get ruined by doing so. Then we entered the picture in several social media sites and challenged anybody to come up with a picture of a baby that was uglier. The voting would be decided by the followers of all the sites. Each social media outlet would have its own winner, depending on how the followers voted.

The contest brought out some of the ugliest baby pictures on the planet! Some of these babies did not even look human! Of course some people used the forum wrongly and posted pictures of things that were not human. Those pictures were ordered taken down but the fact was that many of the babies shown looked similar to the animals and other things posted. The parents of these babies had to either be very ashamed of themselves for producing such ugly offspring or they had to be elated to have had the ability to stoop so low!

The social media loved the contest. On one social media (Can I say Facebook?), the contest went viral. Within a week of going up it had generated over ten million (10,000,000) likes and each like had an entry into the contest. Of course many of the babies shown were actually very beautiful children, but the contest was geared toward ugly babies. Some people put up pictures of children with birth defects. This was not what the contest owners had in mind, but it did get the attention of medical specialists who knew what the problem was with many of these children, and thus aligned the children with proper treatment. The contest was merely for babies who were naturally ugly and in the end it came back to that. On one social media (Can I say Pininterest?), a picture was posted of a baby that made the original baby look like a beuty queen. The baby shown was actually green due to some odd genetic disorder that pigmented him that way. He was the epitome of the "little green man from Mars".

His parents were a farming couple in a developing nation. They had stumbled upon the contest and knew their baby was ugly. In fact they gave him a name that in their native tongue meant "beaten" because they said he looked like he had been cursed by their gods. He not only had green skin but his eyes had pupils like that of a cat. He had been examined and it was determined that it was a genetic malfunction of some type that had caused his issues. He was in no danger of dying. He was just ugly! Needless to say he won the contest on his social media page as well as the overall category. The African-American girl with the pointed head came in first on her page and second in the overall category. Both babies were examined by doctors, who determined that they would become quite handsome as they grew. The child with the green skin was going to be okay as well. Specialists felt that the genetic disorder which had caused the pigmentation would correct itself. Both babies would become normal adults. In fact, the baby who had started it all would eventually become Miss Universe. The social media frenzy she had garnered brought her parents good fortune. The parents received some good investing advice and became quite wealthy. They were also advised not to have any more children!