Joseph Anthony Barton was born in Huyton, Liverpool and he’s the oldest of four brothers. His parents separated when he was 14 years old and after that he lived with his dad at his grandmother’s house. Joey’s brother Michael was sentenced to life imprisonment after he was involved in a racially motivated murder in 2005.
Joey himself has had some troubles with the law too, but nothing as serious as his brother. In May 2005 he broke a person’s leg while he was driving around in the Liverpool city centre. In March 2007 he was arrested for the suspicion of assault and criminal damage after an alleged argument with a taxi driver, but he was cleared of that charge in May 2008. Joey spent 77 days in prison in 2008 after an incident outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Liverpool.
Joey has done some good things too. He’s involved in a charity set up to support people who have addiction problems and no financial support, he is part of a campaign designed to keep children out of trouble, and he has also taken part in a celebrity cricket match for charity to help fund a new children’s rehabilitation unit at a hospital in Manchester.
Other good things that he has done are things like signing the e-petition about justice for Kevin Williams who died at Hillsborough at the age of 15, and he also passed it on to all his followers on twitter so that they could sign it too.
It’s so easy to judge people but you seldom see the whole picture and look at it from different angles. I only saw the bad things he has done and the negative headlines and texts about him and that made me think that he was nothing more than an idiot, but now when I read his tweets and hear him speak I realise that he is quite intelligent.
Some days ago he wrote on twitter that he was going to a meeting for anonymous alcoholics and that it’s nothing wrong about needing the help from other people, that it’s actually the exact opposite, and he also wrote that people don’t have to struggle through life alone. Those words prove that he is a smart man and quite a deep thinker.
Joey Barton is not the only one I have had preconceptions about, actually I have had it about a lot of people just like I think everybody have. I dislike a lot of football players because they play for one of Liverpool’s biggest rivals or because I have read something about them that give me a picture of them, but often I just take the words in without thinking about the sources and that can give me a picture which doesn’t conform to reality. I get more and more critical in my reading which makes me question many things and I also compare different texts to each other to see if they say the same things, fearfully often they don’t.
(I have used wikipedia, twitter and my own head as sources for this text.)
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