I'm posting it because it makes me feel better to hear it after all of the stuff that follows this sentence, and perhaps it will make you feel better as well.
Just since then there were two more young kids who killed themselves after being bullied.
There was 13-year-old Asher Brown, an eighth-grader who shot himself in the head. Officials of his school in Cypress, Texas, outside of Houston, ignored his parents' complaints for a year and a half. And there was Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old who hung himself from a tree in his backyard in Tehachapi, California and was on life support for nine days until he died. Seth was also a middle-schooler and was bullied, and again school officials were useless.
So, yeah. Three kids from small towns who didn't even live to see their 16th birthday. As I said, the thought is that once kids get out of high school and get into college, especially one near a big metro area, things get better.
Ha ha. Joke's on us. Sometimes even that's not enough. Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University, jumped off the George Washington Bridge in New York. His roommate and another student secretly watched him via webcam on Sept. 19th while Tyler was in his room with another man and tweeted about it. Two days later the roommate, Dharun Ravi, then tweeted to his followers: "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again" and attempted to stream live video of Tyler having sex. The next day Tyler took his own life. His body was found today.
I can't express the anger I have over these kids' deaths. Last night I turned off my computer earlier than normal to get away from the website stories, Facebook posts and tweets about these kids. I needed a break. I got home from a movie today and went online, and just about the first thing I found on Twitter was this story about rapper 50 Cent's Tweet that men over 25 who don't perform oral sex on women should kill themselves, and it set me off again.
I saw a Twitter reply from someone who wished that 50 Cent would suffer the same fate as Tupac Shakur. It may be very wrong to wish ill of people, but there are a hell of a lot of people whose final fates, especially if they were gruesome and painful, I wouldn't exactly be saddened by.
But at the same time, I still feel that, somehow, we have to get past this anger and work to make the world better. And when I clicked on the YouTube link posted by my friend LCM, and listened to Annie Lennox sing that song, it helped me a lot.
As I've said before, even though they're killing themselves, these kids are being murdered. Everyone with the ability to stop this -- parents, school officials, the justice system, local, state and federal elected officials -- must do so. If they don't, whether it's due to outright hatred and bigotry or just incompetence, then action must be taken by the rest of us. The messages from people on the It Gets Better page, the message today from Ellen DeGeneres (I can't embed it, so here's the link), these things are fine. But they're only a start.
LCM posted this message with the video link: "All this talk this week of bully's and hate and dying has been a rather somber revisit to my own formative years. I remember one song - and songs were so important to me then - that when it came out I just thought 'I wish I could believe this - I wish, I wish, I wish.' But I couldn't trust it in my heart. Not til later. And that's what kids need - time. So desparately."
Truer words have never been spoken.
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