Make it Stop

St. John of the Cross / San Juan de la Cruz / St. Jean de la Croix

We spent the last week on Captiva Island, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast.  It is a place of rustic beauty, largely overgrown by palms, sea grape and scrub pine. The weather somehow seems more "real" when not competing with traffic and neon and jet exhaust, so one can actually sense the subtle changes to light and wind and water each day. There are few people around during this "shoulder season" between the end of hurricane weather and the arrival of the snowbirds, most of them retirees from Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is not unusual to have a quarter-mile or more of shoreline completely to yourself, other than a bustling tide of sea birds who always seem to be working so busily that one feels almost enough guilt to reach for the corporate Blackberry. Almost.

"In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night." ANTOINE ST. EXUPERY

Thursday night, we made plans to watch the Geminid meteor shower from the beach.  With very little artificial light, it's possible to see an amazing array of celestial detail on Captiva, and the coincidental new moon meant we should be able to take in the show with very little interference.

Alas, when the time came, a swiss-cheese blanket of clouds had spread across the island.  Nevertheless, we took advantage of what gaps there were and glimpsed at least a handful of the quick darts of light the particles made as they zipped by.

Our last full day of vacation dawned warm and muggy, and the clouds cleared up by the time lunch was over, promising a solid beach afternoon to wrap up our week.  The youngest member of our party was my companion on boogie boards in the gentle surf until he found a buddy his own age and left me to seek company with the grown-up types.

We learned the news of the school shootings in Connecticut from passers-by, and instinctively reached for smart phones to see what was happening.  It was hard to reconcile the squeals of laughter from the kids at the water's edge with the nightmarish experience I knew other kids, very close to their age, had been through. As the details were pieced together, the predictable pattern of debate was playing out on Facebook walls and blog posts: gun control, mental health care, school prayer.... a kaleidoscope of speculation and rhetoric, all coming from a place of confusion and pain.  Because of course nobody, regardless of politics, would wish the scene in that school on a sworn enemy, let alone a first-grader.

I have my own thoughts about guns, and health care, and school prayer, and I was not immune from the impulse to share them in the raw voice of someone trying to process the unthinkable, in what appears to be an arms race of ever-escalating unthinkables, because we can't seem as a nation to figure out what's driving people to such acts.

That night, after trying to stay out of earshot of TV gunfire, I hit the beach again with a longtime friend and the dad of my little surfing buddy.  We didn't talk much as we scanned the much-clearer sky for laggard shooting stars we were told we might see.  Staring up at the bejeweled blitz overhead, I remembered what the Little Prince told his pilot friend after meeting the snake whose bite he knew was his destiny: "In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night."

We saw one meteor each, and trudged home again with stiff necks for our trouble.

On a scrap of paper on my bulletin board at work are four words I scribbled to illustrate something to a co-worker who was coming to grips with a difficult family situation

 HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE.

People are calling for -- in addition to gun control -- stronger mental health systems which would ostensibly identify and separate the about-to-become-unhinged from our innocent kids. But -- to repeat an old adage I heard The Right Rev. Gene Robinson quote in a sermon -- it's not enough to keep pulling drowning people out of the water. We've got to head upstream and figure out who is throwing them in! I believe we should as a society take a closer look at how we treat each other, particularly how we treat those who don't fit the mold. Let's face it: we haven't exactly achieved the "kinder, gentler nation" we were promised back in 1988, right after I survived high school relatively unscathed. Instead it appears we have appointed Anne Robinson from The Weakest Link to determine who is smart, Simon Cowell to determine who is talented, and the Peter Pan chairman of Abercrombie & Fitch to determine who is attractive. In case you haven't noticed, these are not especially nice people, at least not the personas they wear for us.  It's not especially cool to be nice, is it? We trade casual put-downs with our friends and cheer at TV shows whose purpose seems to be to determine who can be the meanest.  And those who don't impress us or have anything to offer, we simply tune out.

If you are blessed with good looks, talent, and/or a good support system to constantly reassure you of your worth, you can survive the daily onslaught of unrealistic standards and "good-natured" barbs. But in the America of fractured homes and three-career families, where spend our days bumbling from one screen to another (I bought a week's worth of groceries today without interacting once with another human... is this really progress?), who's doing that for the people who aren't quite that strong? Who is noticing the misfit who eats his lunch alone? Whose job is it to compliment how well she draws on every surface that will take the marks of her pen?

 When I wrote about suicide a while back, I wondered if teachers have the bandwidth to understand the social dynamics of their classroom and keep anybody from falling through the cracks, but I don't think it can all fall on them. It's got to come from all of us. Nobody should be unworthy of a smile or an inquiry about their day. They may not respond in a way we would call grateful or even appropriate, but they were noticed, seen; they mattered, if even for a minute. Another Facebook poster railed that we should never mention these high-profile killers' names again, because recognition was all they were looking for. If that's true, if a tortured mind has been screaming to be heard to the point where it takes murder or suicide to get our attention, then shame on us. Maybe if they got it at age seven, we wouldn't be in this predicament. Maybe.

Into the Light

ST. MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS

I hated gym class. Skinny, uncoordinated and myopic, I knew that whatever activity they dreamed up, I wasn't going to be good at it. Some things, like crab soccer and pillow polo, were okay, because they really didn't require much skill. But I dreaded anything where some kids, invariably the jocks, got to pick teams, because I was certain to be damn near last, and with good reason.

None of us kids was particularly athletic, although at least one of my sisters played softball on a real team and was apparently popular to acquire a non-derogatory nickname from the P.E. teacher. I was afforded no such cool moniker; instead, one of the other kid's dads who was brought in as a guest teacher said I "wrestled like a girl". I find that interesting because I don't think mud wrestling was popular yet, so I don't know upon what experience he based his assessment.

But I guess I was lucky; I didn't go to the school in Decatur, Ala., where the teacher invented a game called "smear the queer" in which a single student is singled out to be slogged by volleyballs by the entire rest of the class.

Seems kind of shocking that only happened about twelve years ago. Would we tolerate such a thing now? Apparently, we would. In the past few weeks, no fewer than three high school boys committed suicide after enduring sustained torment at the hands of their peers.

Seth

Seth Walsh, 13, of Tehachapie, California, hanged himself from a tree on September 19th. He was found alive and placed on life support, but died a few days later. Despite a program to prevent such abuse and a principal whose principal boasts of her degree in child counseling, investigators were told by Seth's peers that he had been the victim of sustained bullying. They determined, however, that no crime had been committed and no charges were filed.

Asher

Asher Brown, an eighth-grader from Houston, shot himself in the head last week. His parents say they have complained repeatedly to the school, by phone and in person, about the four classmates made hassling Asher a full-time job for the past eighteen months, simulating gay sex acts on him in gym class and making fun of his inexpensive clothes. Administrators say they were never told about the bullying.

Billy

Billy Lucas, from Indiana, never told anybody he was gay, but his classmates apparently decided that for him. Administrators claim he was "happy and well-adjusted", but yet classmates tell a different story which should be getting sadly familiar by now. His family found him in their barn where he had hanged himself.

One could ask what the hell is going on in these schools that there could be so much opportunity for kids to lash out at one another unchecked by a teacher or other adult. Maybe all the budget cuts have made it impossible to know who's doing what to who. I would like to hear from those who work in schools: Do you see kids like Billy, Asher and Seth? What is done about it?

Roy

I have to wonder, however, how many teachers and coaches and parents think such behavior is normal (et tu, Darwin?) and thus allow it continue or even encourage it. You know, it'll make a man out of you. And if this was limited to a few embarrassing moments in gym class, it might be survivable. But I shared with you in a former post the case of Roy Jones, a seventeen-month-old boy who died from a beating he got from his mother's boyfriend, because he "acted like a girl". I liked that ABC called him a baby, even though technically he isn't, because it emphasizes the mania in our culture around gender roles and the lengths to which people will go to make sure the traditional ones are enforced, even at an age where a kid doesn't even know what they mean or whether he or she is exhibiting them or not.

Tyler

Today's story was the proverbial straw. News is spreading tonight about the case of Tyler Clementi, a first-year Rutgers student from Ridgewood, N.J. and classical violinist. Tyler had either told his roommate he was gay or at least it was suspected, because when he asked for a few hours of privacy, a webcam was left running to record his romantic time with a male visitor while the roommate provided a running commentary on Twitter as well as a video feed on the Internet. Confronted with this invasion, the shy student was so distraught that he lept from the George Washington Bridge to his death.

I do not know all the facts of all these cases. I don't know these boys' mental health histories or to what degree either parents or administrators were forthcoming in what they told the media and the police. What I do know is that our kids learn what they know about what it means to be male, female, gay, straight or somewhere in between from us. From what we say, how we act, and how we treat people.

34,000 Americans commit suicide every year, and -- among young people -- every suicide is shadowed by 100-200 unsuccesful attempts. LGBT youth are four times more likely to commit or attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. I don't believe that is due to some genetic trait: I think it's because growing up is hard enough without being told repeatedly by peers, trusted adults and the media that there's something abnormal about you.

If it outrages or saddens you that so many young lives have been diminished or snuffed out, than know this: These are just a handful of extreme cases... this goes on all the time, in varying degrees, in every school in this country because some kids don't live up to other people's expectations of how they should dress, talk or throw a ball.

Teachers, look out for the Trevors and the Billys. Think about the words you use and understand the difference between good-natured teasing and outright terror. Maybe you could be the one adult that they can count on if things rough. Parents, you can't expect the school to teach your kids that it's not okay to treat people this way; they need to hear it from you. And maybe you should let them read the stories about these boys: Seth, Asher, Billy, Tyler, and poor little Roy, so that they see what it does to them inside.

I was lucky to have enough of a support system to reach adulthood and understand that people who act this way are saying more about themselves and their own insecurities than they are about you. In college I started lifting weights, finally finding an athletic activity that I didn't need great hand-eye coordination to accomplish. Current deadlift, 300 lb, thankyouverymuch, and I no longer feel like a victim. Most of the time.

On October 17th, friends and I are participating in Out of the Darkness, a Community Walk to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. If you are in a position to contribute anything to help this worthy cause, please visit this link. It would be much appreciated. If you would like to know more about anti-bullying, LGBT youth and suicide prevention, please visit the links below:

• www.afsp.org - American Society for Suicide Prevention
• thetrevorproject.org - Hotline and other resources for LGBT Youth
• thinkb4youspeak.org - Discourages use of anti-gay language and verbal bullying
• truthwinsout.org - Fighting anti-gay lies and the ex-gay myth
• matthewshepard.org - Parents of a murdered gay teen founded this rights and education group