How Many of These Can We Take?

My Bullied Son's Last Day On Earth
I'll repeat the question. How many of these stories can we as a body of supposedly compassionate people take before we demand some change be made in how look at our world and raise our youths - or not even youths, adults included. There isn't a reason in the world why an 11 year-old should be killing himself. There isn't. There just isn't. 

And yet here it is. Another youngster takes his own life for what is becoming the mental burden of a thematically similar form of trauma. Peer-abuse on account of perceived homosexuality. 

The issue at hand is that this is becoming the go-to form of verbal abuse amongst the youth. Gay becoming synonymous with lame, the fall-back insult. The question is why? Why has "gay", a seemingly innocuous term and a perfectly natural way of life, been manipulated into an insult? What, after all, is wrong with being gay, so wrong that our vernacular has been able to extend its meaning into a vague and overall insult of one's very character? The answer is because the cultural fabric in which we live in is one that is practically opposed to or afraid of allowing gay culture in. The door is for the most part closed. You can be gay, just keep quiet about it, don't make too much noise, and keep it as far from developing, inquiring minds as possible. In that willful ignorance and abnegation of it, we either create or do nothing to dismiss the stigma that there is something abnormal or wrong with homosexuality, which to anyone who has paid attention to human history or even biology in both the human and animal kingdom knows, there isn't. 

And yet every time something comes up, a movie wherein gay life is depicted and not aimed specifically at adult audiences, a children's book a la JK Rowling wherein there is perhaps a gay character or two, or whatever the case, we have a gamut of conservative pundits and loudmouthed, uninformed, and biased blowhards jumping into the fray explaining to the public why this is wrong, why young people shouldn't be exposed to things like this, why being gay is okay but they just think people shouldn't talk about it so much, or why it's so important for our legal system to recognize a marital code more or less enforcing a clause of "separate but equal". Saying that is practically tantamount to saying young people shouldn't be exposed to reality. 

By shunning these things form developing minds, by keeping them not only in the closet but buried under a cluttered pile of clothes, we do nothing to mediate this situation. What happens is the myth of homosexuality is perpetuated and thus when they are at last exposed to it within their peers groups and most likely at school, as they incontrovertibly will be, they react the very way their culture has taught them, with disgust, with fear, with confusion, and ultimately with scorn - because they know no better. They treat them like abnormalities, like circus sideshows, as though there were something deficient in them rather than their being something abhorrently deficient in the system that continues to promulgate these false stereotypes of homosexuality.

So another young, intelligent, talented, and unfortunately deeply tired, burdened, and saddened young boy takes his own life by hanging himself from his own belt in his own room in his own house, leaving his mother and siblings to discover the sordid scene. You can go on and on about how bullying has gone on ad infinitum, a natural part of growing up, but this transcends bullying. This is outright disgust and hatred. This is different, I feel, than bullying someone for weight or appearance or any other feature. This is akin to racism. This is attacking the very core of someone's humanity. Essentially, this kind of bullying is saying that who that person is as a human being is wrong, is an aberration to the species. Now, who knows about this young boy's sexuality. That isn't even really the issue. The issue is that the preconceived notion that he was gay and that there was something wrong in that was used against him as a means of gradually tearing him apart.

What stories like these do, if anything, is buttress the fact that what we desperately need as a culture is an education or series of awareness programs that carefully addresses homosexuality in a healthy way, showing it as something natural and congenital to life and not demonizing it or hushing it the way mainstream media does. People should be exposed to it because at some point or another they will be exposed to it, and if they're under the false impression that it's something morally, teleologically, and fundamentally wrong their natural reaction to it is going to be one of fright - or worse.

My thoughts go out to the mother of Jaheem Herrera. My thoughts go out to his siblings and his friends, all of whom will never see his bright face again. My thoughts go out to every mother and father that ever has to endure something like this until we as a society make this necessary change in order for us a whole to to approach the world we live in, and the sensitive people who inhabit said world along with us, with the proper amount of care, decorum, and compassion that one would hope be shown to them. I don't know much about Jaheem, but according to his mother he loved to dance, he loved to have fun, and he loved to make friends. He sounds like a exemplary boy to me.