There’s a lot of talk about bullying these days, and I say it’s way past time for that; we should have done this years ago. A certain meanness has been far too ingrained in our society for far too long. Things have gotten better, in many ways, but if we are to become truly great as a nation and as a people, we have to take a different attitude. Even though bigotry has become less acceptable in recent years, there is still too much of an accepting attitude when it comes to meanness toward others, for a variety of reasons.
No doubt you’ve heard a lot about bullying in recent weeks; it’s hard to avoid it. This recent spate of stories is due to what seems to be a saddening trend, in which young people are increasingly committing suicide because they are gay, and they are made to feel like outcasts. And why wouldn’t they? They see judgment all around them, and a lot of it’s negative. They may hear about places like San Francisco, West Hollywood or Greenwich Village, where they can be who they are and live freely, but to a teenager living in the self-righteous “Bible Belt,” those places may as well be Mars. And that should be shameful to the people who live in those places.
We will never be a truly free country until every person under our auspices is treated with the respect and dignity due them as human beings. We are who we are; we should all be left alone to our own lives. No one, and I mean no one, should be subjected to negative treatment because of any singular aspect of who he or she is, unless they are hurting others with their actions. Who a person is sexually attracted to is not the totality of who they are, and frankly, that aspect of anyone’s life is none of your business, in any case. I mean, if they’re having sex in the middle of the street, of course you have a right to object, but other than that, it’s simply no one’s business. And I think we would all agree that we would have the same reaction even if it was a man and a woman.
Why are we so hell-bent on passing judgment on anyone, based on criteria about their lives about which we know nothing, and which is none of our business? Why do we think our personal judgment about someone should be important enough to deny them a basic right to their own lives, lived in whatever way they see fit? And why do we treat anyone we see as “different” with anything but dignity and respect?
In a nutshell, you have a right to an opinion, even if it is a disgusting bigoted opinion based on complete ignorance. But you do not have the right to negatively affect anyone else’s life with that opinion. Got it? Being a part of a society requires compassion. It requires us as humans to suppress our prejudices and bigotry, and assume the best about our fellow man. No one should ever be made to feel like an outcast, because every single person on a society is necessary.
The neocon influence is strong in our society these days, and it’s the main reason the United States has gone from world icon to world pariah in 30 short years. There are many very wrong but very loud voices out there who proclaim that we are all individuals, and that each of us is responsible only for just ourselves and our immediate family, and that simply isn’t true.
We all need each other. We are all part of the same society, and every single one of us has a small part in making it work. The single mother in the poorest section of the city has just as much worth as Bill Gates. The child she is raising might grow up to be the president. Of course, that child may grow up and wash cars for a living, and that’s okay, too; we all need our car washed, don’t we? And why do we value lawyers and doctors more than landscapers and construction workers? Is the doctor really more necessary to our society than the factory worker in the plant that makes the MRI machine? I don’t think doctors would be quite as successful working in a meadow. Everyone has a place in society, regardless of how invisible they seem to be at times. Everyone is vital. And everyone deserves dignity.
Though this country has taken self-centeredness to new heights in the neocon era, the fact of the matter is, we are where we are because we all worked together for years and years. We all paid for building this country into what it once was with our money, our blood and our sweat. Take a minute to look around the room; just about everything in your life was made by someone else, and your work is performed to make someone else’s life better; otherwise what’s the point? How are you reading this post, folks? I wrote it for you on a Toshiba laptop with an Intel processor, and it’s being written on Windows Live Writer and uploaded on a server that someone put there for me, via an Internet that was built by a bunch of people who worked hard for the last 40 years to see their dreams come to fruition. We all need each other; no one is more important than anyone else. We couldn’t have this life without the input and the skills of millions of other people. I know a neocon posting his crap on Newsmax thinks he is the center of his universe, but it took a lot of people to make it possible for him to post his fact-free misogynistic rants anonymously on the Internet, where like-minded cretins can each drool over their own ignorance. It’s really not magic, you know.
We need each other, and we are completely dependent on each other. And though neocons like to think of us as a huge corporation, a country is far more like a family. When bad things happen, like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some of the more cynical uncles among us exploit it for their own aims, but the vast majority of us come together as a family. You cried on 9/11, when those buildings fell and you knew there were thousands of people inside. We cry when we see the flag-draped coffins of soldiers coming home for the last time, even when they are not our blood relatives. When Tim McVeigh bombed a government building in Oklahoma City, we came together as if we were all family, and that is what we are. When we saw the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, most of us came together, like a family, because our brothers and sisters on the Gulf Coast were hurting.
If you really take time to think about it, you know I’m right. When something tragic happens in this country, you feel it viscerally. And it’s not just tragedy that brings us together. When the first black president was inaugurated a year and a half ago, the pride we all felt was the pride one feels when a member of our family overcomes an obstacle that once seemed insurmountable.
Let me tell you, people; some in our family are hurting, and hurting badly; what are we going to do about it? Some people in our American family are being made to feel like outcasts, as if they don’t belong. They are being made to feel that, if they stay true to themselves, they will be denied the opportunity to follow their dreams and to make their contribution to the American experience. And it’s just plain wrong. No member of our family should be made to feel that way.
If you contribute in any way to making anyone feel like an outcast, unless they have committed a serious crime against society, you should be ashamed of yourself. No one should be made to feel as if being who they are puts them at a disadvantage in society. What right do the rest of us have to hold a plebiscite to decide who should have rights and who shouldn’t? I mean, if it was up to me, fat, drunk rednecks with one working tooth, who only bathe on Christmas and Easter should have fewer rights than anyone. And can’t we all agree that anyone who gets most of their news from Fox is too stupid to be allowed to have free speech?
Of course not. Hell; I just wrote a post upholding the free speech rights of scumbag Fred Phelps and his inbred church group. Even that asshole has rights. Now, surely, if he has the right to picket soldiers’ funerals, you have to agree that a nice kid who plays in the band and doesn’t break any laws should not have his rights subject to the approval of a bunch of loudmouths with neither a moral compass or convictions. Right?
We should all be ashamed because these kids are committing suicide. I’m ashamed, and I never had the pleasure of meeting any of them. I’ve only known two people who ever committed suicide, and one of them was gay and had been outed before he was ready. And that was more than 25 years ago. When do we grow up, folks? How can we be content to live in a society in which someone can feel that despondent about just being who he is.
Look, folks; I’m 52 years old and I’ve never been married. I have short blonde hair and blue eyes. I am usually soft spoken (I said usually!), and in my past, I was very shy with women. For most of my life, I was skinny as a rail – wiry, I think they called it. I don’t think I weighed more than 160 until I was in my 40s. I also love movie and Broadway musicals and showtunes, I can sing a lot of them, although my voice isn’t what it once was. I think Judy Garland was a goddess. And I count a number of gay people among my best friends; friends I would do anything for, and (I think) vice versa. I know nothing about cars, nor do I care to know, and short of putting Ikea furniture together, I don’t care to fix or build anything myself.
Despite the potential for stereotype, I am not gay. I know this, because I have never looked at another man and felt any sexual attraction whatsoever. I do feel that way toward women I care about, so I’m not confused about my sexuality and never have been. But there is a spectrum of sexuality out there, and I have known someone at most points on that spectrum. They all have one thing in common; they’re human. And with a couple of exceptions, they are good people, and that is all that should matter.
I have been “mistaken” for “gay” a number of times in my life, from people on all points on that sexual preference spectrum. I have been hit on or asked out by quite a few guys in my life, all of whom were actually quite nice and gentlemanly when I explained to them I wasn’t interested. Perhaps it was because I just said, “No thank you, I’m not interested,” instead of “Get away from me, you f-ing homo/queer/faggot.” I have found that people respond better when you don’t call them names, I’m not sure why that is.
And I have seen a lot of harassment. In fact, I have an interesting story about that. I was at a club in West Hollywood many years ago with a friend, who happened to be gay. We were getting ready to leave, and I went outside ahead of him to get the car. I went around to the parking lot to the back of the club, and there were two idiots standing out there, smoking cigarettes across the street. Of course, I didn’t know they were idiots until they spoke and removed all doubt to that effect.
“Hey faggot!” one of them yelled to me.
“No, thank you, I don’t smoke!” I yelled back at them, without looking at them. (I have always been a bit of a smartass; what can I say?)
As I got into the car and started it, my peripheral vision caught them walking toward me. One of them was, um, asking if I would like him to perform an act on me that I think was still illegal in several southern states at the time. Before I could ask him if that illegality was why he’d moved to California, my friend (the gay one) came around the corner, and politely asked him if he could return the favor. They backed off immediately, probably because he was about six-foot-six, weighed about 260 and was a professional athlete.
This is why hate crimes legislation is needed, folks. I was about to be beaten up by someone who thought I “looked” gay, and the only thing that probably saved me was a gay man whom they would never guess to be gay, even though he was coming out of a night club in West Hollywood. These people are ignorant, they have absolutely no self-esteem and they target people at random based on what they look like. If you can’t see the difference between someone who kills someone because they “look gay” and someone who kills someone because he stole their drug money, you’re not thinking.
We all need to embrace each other. We all need to accept reality, including the cracker/redneck/ignoramus population; black and brown people are here and they’re staying; strong women are here and they’re staying; undocumented immigrants are here and they’re staying; and Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender individuals are here and they’re staying. And they all have most of us to back them up.
Well, they should have most of us backing them up, anyway.
That’s the next thing we need to talk about. We need to back these people up. LGBT people need to know we have their backs. We have to start speaking up, and letting them know it’s alright to be whatever you are, at least as loudly as the ignorant hordes scream their hate.
If you’re supposedly Christian, and you think homosexuality is a sin, well, you’re wrong,. But whether you’re right or wrong is absolutely beside the point. Your spiritual leader, Jesus Christ, demanded that you hate the sin and love the sinner. Therefore, even if you think homosexuality is a sin, you have no choice but to love the homosexual, and treat him or her with the same dignity as everyone else. Under your own religious doctrine, you are instructed that you have no right to pass judgment upon anyone who hasn’t committed a crime against you or society, and that whatever people do in the privacy of their own space is between them and their maker, not between them and you.
Basically, it’s like this; if you think smoking is wrong, don’t smoke. If you think drinking alcohol is wrong, don’t drink. If you think homosexual sex is wrong, than don’t do it. But even if you believe that men having sex with men and women having sex with women is wrong, you have no right to tell others what to do. And if you’re telling anyone that what you THINK these people do in the privacy of their own home makes them less than you as a human being, well, you’d better speak to your clergy like right now, because you’ve just committed more sins than any homosexual couple is.
If you are a parent, and you’re telling your child that any other child is lesser for any reason, you are doing a disservice to your child, in a couple of levels, not the least of which is, your child might find out you’re wrong, and not believe anything else you say after that. And be careful; if you say something nasty about someone else because of their sexual preference (or any other arbitrary reason) in front of your child, or within earshot of your child, your child will remember that, even when he or she finds out he or she is gay. And even if you don’t mean to do so, you will make it more difficult for them to be who they are. I know kids watch a lot of TV and spend a lot of time on the computer these days, but parents are still the strongest influence on a child, and everything you do to, with, in front of, or within earshot of your child has a lasting effect.
Which leads me to the whole bullying thing. It really has to stop.
I know bullying is a generational thing, but this generation has to stop it cold. It’s not okay, period. There is way too much acceptance of “boys will be boys” (and girls are sometimes even worse), and we have to work harder to teach civility.
I spent part of my childhood on both sides of bullying, although I didn’t realize until I was much older that I actually did some bullying. myself. It was such a part of the culture that I didn’t even recognize it. But first, I was bullied.
When I was little, my mother had a tendency to dress my brothers and me like, well, dorks. I was also cursed with bad eyesight; I was actually born legally blind in my left eye, and even after several miraculous eye operations (think lasik without the lasers), I had to wear really thick glasses. My mother hated long hair, so we all had buzz cuts. And I was really scrawny throughout my elementary school years, so I got picked on. A lot. I hated to fight; it’s just not in my nature, so I was branded a “pussy” and was threatened by a number of neighborhood kids, many of whom had the support of their fathers, because there’s a meme out there that the only way you can become a “man” is to beat the shit out of other kids during childhood.
When I was in first grade, the neighborhood bully was Danny. He was a year older and a lot taller than me, and one day, he just jumped on me and started hitting me. My mom saw it and broke it up and made us make up, before she marched us both down to Danny’s house, where his mother made him apologize. He and I became best friends after that.
A couple of years after that, we moved to a different neighborhood. It was only about 3 miles away, but in those days, it might as well have been another planet. New neighborhood, new set of bullies. I had a lot of friends, but when I was alone, some of the neighborhood bullies would mess with me, and did so repeatedly. It got really tiresome; so much so that, when I was in sixth grade, I finally did something to end it.
My friend Howie and I had an argument, and being boys in 1969, the only way to settle things was to fight. Our school had this huge field with a small hill, so we went on the other side of the hill, took our coats off and squared off. Neither one of us wanted to fight, but hey; it was part of the unwritten “code,” ya know? Anyway, we were going at it kind of half-assed, practically laughing as we fought. We were just about to finish, when the school bully, Jamie, came along and threw his two cents into things.
I don’t know what Jamie said, exactly, but whatever it was, it set me off, and I beat the living shit out of that kid. If you want an equivalent, think “A Christmas Story,” when Ralphie beats up Scott Farkas. Only it was worse in my case, because my mother was nowhere near to stop it. That incident scared the hell out of me, because it was pure adrenaline, or psychosis or something –- and that was the last time I ever laid a hand or fist on another human being. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do so in self defense, or the defense of my family or friends, but it made me think hard about what I was capable of, and whether or not I would want to hurt someone else ever again.
Years later, when I was in high school, I had a classmate in a few classes and a weekly study hall who was, to put it mildly, one of the oddest people I have ever known. His antics would never be tolerated in schools today, but back then we would just laugh at him. He used to regularly bring knives to school. He was the only person I know who carried a briefcase to school every day, and it was almost a treat to guess what he might pull out of it on any given day. One day, it was nunchucks, another time is was a kamas; you just never knew. His favorite books – no, scratch that – the ONLY books I ever saw him read were The Executioner series of books, which were like a Harlequin Romance for men. Lots of spying and killing of bad guys, some bedding of girls, but mostly, he killed. I used to torment John mercilessly, especially during study halls. I was so bad that, on his list of people he was going to kill when he graduated, I was second behind the Vice Principal.
I have a brutal sarcastic streak, and I honed it on John. I was merciless. I never really thought about it after I graduated, until a former classmate and I started working together at a law firm in Baltimore and for some reason, John’s name came up at lunch. We said some awful things about him that day, things that really made me feel bad a few weeks later, when there John was, on the front page of the local paper. It seems he had been living in a really crappy home in a rundown neighborhood, next door to his sister, when her house burned down and killed his niece. The guilt that washed over me was immense, and I realized that no one deserves to be talked about the way I spoke about him. No one. I just found out he died a few years back, and I am so sorry I said many of the things I did back then.
Bullying is wrong, and it’s time we took it seriously. I can’t go back and re-do the past, but I have taught my son to accept and have compassion for everyone, and it seems to have stuck. There should be zero tolerance for bullying, especially when it comes to kids. Kids should also be discouraged from developing cliques, and excluding other people. I mean, we find it funny to watch Glee and see kids hit with Slushies, but it’s fiction; in real life, it’s not funny at all. None of us is better than anyone else. Once school is over and everyone graduates, they are all on the same level on the playing field, or at least should be, and kids need to know this. They should also know that, in the real world, no one will tolerate bullying, because we have grown up as a people and we can’t have that any more.
No one in our society should feel like an outcast for any reason, unless they commit a serious crime against others. Otherwise, whether they are short or tall; whether they are thin or fat; whether they are blonde, brunette, redhead or dyed pink or blue; brown, black, yellow, white or any mixture; whether they have a vagina or a penis or one of each; or whether they are gay, straight, bi, or confused, they are all part of the human race, and deserve dignity.
The things we say and do to or about others matters, folks. If you wouldn’t like to hear it yourself, don’t say it to others. If you wouldn’t like something done to you, don’t do it to someone else. Think before you speak and do things to other people. Remember; just because you’re entitled to your opinion doesn’t mean the rest of us are going to listen to it without responding. Choose your words and actions carefully, and strive to bring peace wherever you are.
Peace makes life less stressful.
