At the risk of sounding like a too-young cynic hardened to the horror of news, allow me to say this: after only two weeks, this has become old news.
I refer, of course, to the tragic news item from two days before Valentine's Day which rocked the gay communities that watch the news here in the States (and our brothers and sisters across our northern border in Canada). To the three uninformed gay people out there, and any straight people who, for some reason, are reading a gay-themed blog, that news item would be the murder of Lawrence King.
Lawrence King, a fifteen-year-old boy in the eighth grade, was shot in the head for being gay. Horrible and sickening as anti-gay bullying in schools is without making the situation more miserable, though, it does get worse. It turns out, as Barbara Coloroso tells us in Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, that there is a link between bullying and genocide itself.
"Coloroso draws parallels between behaviour exhibited in child bullying [...] and that exhibited in a genocide. She suggests that both share common characteristics: the dehumanization of the victims, an unquestioning obedience to authority, and a routinization of cruelty. “The premise I take on bullying is that it’s not about conflict or anger – it’s about contempt for another human being,” she says."
Terrifying, right? To think that the same kids who are shooting classmates in the head in the middle of English could grow up to be the Hitlers, Envers, and Hutus of tomorrow. When they're not being served charges of attempted murder, anyway.
In a way, I'm almost angry that they've put Lawrence King's killer away in custody pending a trial, and the media has just washed its hands of the matter. While I want to see a murderer punished, anti-gay bullying is not something that's going to go away by putting one fourteen-year-old behind bars. The Oxnard shooting may have been an extreme case, but anti-gay bullying is not an isolated phenomenon, and neither is the murder of gays.
It's not just crazy, misunderstood people who were never hugged as kids who are the problem. The problem runs much deeper, down in the societal attitudes about gays that continue to run rampant through society. Only when people can stop subtly programming their children to believe that gays are abominations before God, only when people like Mike Huckabee can be recognized as the crazed bigots they are when they spout their anti-gay drivel, can we truly see a decline in these kinds of tragedies.
"Our true strength doesn't come from our military or our gross national product, it comes from our families. What's the point of keeping the terrorists at bay in the Middle East if we can't keep decline and decadence at bay here at home?"
Seriously, Mike Huckabee?
I'm not just talking about within the United States, either. I'm talking worldwide.Why isn't more being done yet? Are we really THAT concerned with blowing each other's faces off with nuclear weapons that we can't recognize a global civil rights train wreck and attempt to fix it? Americans especially should be ashamed of ourselves. A first-world nation with a statue dedicated to "huddled masses" that won't even protect those huddled masses it has at home makes me sick.
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