I Forgot To Title This

I write this as I’m on the way to watch a homosexual guy read his essays to me. I really don’t understand how people think in the surreal world that is the upper middle class white Northeast. Judith Warner has written another column that has upset me. Why isn’t anything anyone’s responsibility? She wrote about kids killing themselves after getting bullied – random, although persistent, name calling. First of all she seems surprised that high school boys call people fag and gay. As if this epithet was coined by Ann Coulter eighteen months ago. It would have been a lot easier to just write, “I have no idea what goes on in the real world”. Of course she and her commenters want to make bullying a hanging offense – name calling. I have so many problems with the whole premise of this column that I don’t know where to begin. I think when she writes she should imagine herself reading her column to Elie Wiesel or anyone with problems bigger than the alternative minimum tax. I understand that it’s an awful word, and I’ve been trying very hard to remove it from my vocabulary along with its pumped up brother “faggot” for eighteen months. But if someone kills themselves because they were teased then there is one of two things going on: one, name calling isn’t the real problem, or two, natural selection. If being called a name is too much for little Jimmy to handle then little Jimmy was never cut out for life. Since time began, the way to deal with a bully is by standing up to him or her. Yes, it’s that simple. There are a million ways to do it, but it has to be done. If it gets physical, it gets physical. Dignity is worth an ass whoopin’, whether giving or receiving. In high school bullying boys, as a population, aren’t truly motivated by a hatred of gays or blacks or Jews, they’re motivated at a primal level by a hatred of weakness. That’s why when these incidents escalate and someone really gets hurt, it’s because the bullied party never stood up to the bullying directly. That’s what happens when bullying turns into full blown gay bashing, and it’s what happens when kids snap and show up at school ready for war. ALL CHILDREN GOING THROUGH PUBERTY ARE AWKWARD AND UNCOMFORTABLE AND LOOKING FOR VALIDATION, the bullies and the bullied both. I know what it is to want to protect your children, but sheltering them from everything will only lead to you coming home one day and finding one of them swinging from a chandelier because they found out they weren’t going to be valedictorian or Blanche in Street. We're raising our kids to be emotional AIDS victims, and then blaming anyone and everyone else. This is why the world has justified contempt for us.