I live in a small rural community which, from all appearances, is a throwback to simpler times. Visitors passing through town undoubtedly describe it as "quaint" or "idyllic" when they get home to their friends. In many ways, I'd have to agree. This is classic small-town Americana, and living here is quite different from life in the big city. Sometimes in a good way. Sometimes in a bad way.
And tonight after Fringe was over, Seattle's Q13 News from over the mountains informed me that a student from our local Middle School committed suicide after being ruthlessly and relentlessly persecuted and bullied.
Because he was gay.
Which only reinforces what everybody already knows: no community is immune from this vile poison that's killing our youth. Including my community. And now yet another child is dead...
All because killing himself was the only way this young man felt he could find peace from a society so filled with hate that there was no place in it for him to live...
To say I am horrified and disgusted is an understatement beyond measure.
His school is two minutes from my home.
And now I have to live with the fact that two minutes from my home, a kid was being brutally abused day-in and day-out. And it was so bad that death was considered to be the only way to escape it.
So congratulations to Rick Santorum's vision for a gay-free society!
Job well done to Michele Bachmann's war on gay teens!
Praise the Lord for Pat Robertson's slaying of gay abominations!
And a hearty round of applause to everybody who got their wish when yet another "filthy homosexual" was purged from this earth! Your never-ending quest to create a society that is savagely hostile for anybody different from yourselves is working better than you could have ever dreamed! I'm sure that this freedom-filled American utopia you're working so hard to build for your children will be a paradise unequalled!
Unless your children turn out to be gay, of course.
Or if people just think they're gay.
Or if they happen to wander into the line of fire being taken by another kid who is gay.
Then I guess your kids will have to take their chances just like everybody else. I mean, it's a pity that innocent
Right?!?
One day... hopefully one day very soon... we will look back at this period of history with a shame and horror that is woefully missing today. In the meanwhile, all I can do is say that I'm deeply sorry that we as a society failed you, Rafael Morelos. You deserved far better by our hands. I truly hope you've found the peace you couldn't find in life.
And so it goes...
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It’s for reasons like that Rolling Stone article that we read this morning that makes us feel like America is doomed..
I think the hardest part about this is the reach that the haters have, that the people who would protect them do not. I’m continuously baffled by the hatred, and I too hope that it’s eliminated completely.
That’s the part that kills me, that last bit. First we were assholes to people of different races. Then we apologized and recognized that was wrong Then we were assholes to women. Then we apologized and recognized we were wrong. I don’t understand how we can’t see the issue of homosexuality in the same light and realize now – with the lessons that history has provided – that we’re wrong. That we need to back off. That people are dying.
Sigh.
I’m just so impossibly saddened by the news. And by the fact that a Google search this morning tells me that the local paper contains not one word about Rafael’s death. I had to find it on a Seattle news source. Why?? Because it might embarrass or alienate the readership? Unbelievable. It HAS to stop.
I’d really like to know how the Xtianist vision for America differs in any way real from Germany’s view of how to deal with “the Jewish problem” in WWII. The targets are different (well, not really, as gays were targeted in the Holocaust as well) but the goal is the same: genocide of an entire part of the population. All in the name of their imaginary, fucking sky fairy.
There are days I really wish someone would push the red button and let the cockroaches (the real ones, not the Xitianist) have a go at the planet. Maybe they won’t fuck it up nearly as much as we have.
And then we have wonderful people like my local city councilman.
That’s heartbreaking. I live in a small town too and the idea that that sort of bullying could be going on down the street from me is sickening. Any bullying really.
I’m not sure how I’d have fared with today’s social media frenzy during high school. I didn’t register that I was bi then but I still knew to keep a low profile. Calling someone gay was the worst insult you could hurl back then. Probably just as well my straight friend, the smartest of us all, who got harassed a lot under the supposition she was gay left for private school after sophomore year. Two more years to start fresh was too long to wait for her. Can’t say I was much help when people called her names; I just wanted to be invisible.
SO unbelievably sad. It kills me to hear stuff like that – and I hear about it far too often.
… and this is just one instance of the devastation we actually hear about!
I often wonder if humanity, as a whole, is worthy of continuing to exist. *sigh*