Tyler Clementi/Dharun Ravi/Molly Wei - people are garbage, part 900

Yeah. Get us off the planet, please. All of us. As soon as possible. It's got to happen.

So do you know this story yet? Probably. It seems to be much larger than just around here. Well, here is the short version. Two college freshmen, Dharun Ravi and Tyler Clementi, shared a dorm at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. They do not seem to have been friends, and they did not know one another before September. Tyler was gay, but not out about it. Dharun found out about it, apparently through spying on him, when Tyler asked him to have the room to himself for a few hours, with his webcam and watching it in his friend's room. Her name is Molly Wei. She also goes to Rutgers. Or went. If she didn't stop going, I'm sure she'll be expelled with Dharun, or at least physically prohibited from going when they are in jail. So anyway, he was spying on him. He posted a message to Twitter about it on September 19th that read as such:

Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.

So the next time, he thought it would be funny, I guess, if he showed other people. Tyler again asked for the room, September 21st, and this was Dharun's reaction, again via Twitter:

Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again.

Tyler found out that this had happened (by reading Dharun's Twitter) and jumped off the George Washington Bridge the next day. They found his body yesterday or the day before, I don't know. He left shit on the bridge to identify him - his wallet, with ID inside. He posted this on his Facebook:

jumping off the gw bridge, sorry.

The day he killed himself, Tyler reported Dharun to the person in charge of his floor, as well as two of his superiors. The campus police got involved. Dharun and Molly were arrested and released. They are, for the time being, pre-body being found, facing up to five years for invasion of privacy.

So.

We have a lot of things here. The collision of technology and the ancient intolerance that seems to be endemic to our species, as far as recorded history tells it. The standard "homophobia." It still being largely acceptable to mock gay people, being gay, or having "gay" qualities.

Here are some stupid things people will/have said:

Dharun and Molly didn't mean for him to kill himself. Yeah, well, he jumped, didn't he?

He took it the wrong way. He took having his sexuality, of which he is supposed to be ashamed and for which he is generally reckoned to be going to hell, which is never looked upon by the world as a positive thing, that he had not told his parents (cause you have to tell people that you are gay, but not that you aren't gay) or anyone else, except the guy on the webcam with him, broadcast across the internet to anyone Dharun knew, and in turn anyone they knew and so forth, the wrong way? Yeah, I guess you're right.

It's not their fault he was ashamed of who he was. Well, yeah, it actually is. I doubt he was ashamed though, just made to feel that he should be. I know about that. They made him into a spectacle. What a freak, right?

It was a prank. Not really. I think what people mean by this, if they had the depth of intelligence to consider it, is that being a gay person is funny - it's a novelty. They are characters for us to laugh at, to observe.

He would have done it if Tyler were with a woman, too. Probably not, but I don't think too many people would be questioning if it were wrong if that were the case.

Dharun is open minded/has gay friends. All but the most ardent racists have black friends (especially the kind who say that there are black people and then there are niggers). You'll never meet them though.

They didn't realize what they are doing. If he didn't kill himself, would they ever have realized it? No, it would have kept being funny. Fact. They are fucking 18 years old. Adults. Gotta learn sometime, right? I was raised in the same shitty fucking society as they were, but I got the fucking message early on that it's not fucking ok to hate gay people or make anyone feel like shit for being born. They, apparently, did not get that message. Doesn't matter. You cannot excuse yourself from the grave consequences of actions you deliberately choose by saying "Oh, I didn't realize it." I don't fucking care what you did or didn't realize. Too late, huh? Here are some good examples of this reasoning that fall way short:

• "I only had five beers. I'm usually good like that. I must have fallen asleep."
• "Fuck, I didn't realize it was loaded."
• "I didn't mean to hit you that hard, I was angry."
• "I had no idea the knife was that sharp."
• "I didn't think it would actually hit you, I have bad aim."
• "Shit, I guess it will stain after all. Come on, it was a joke."

I know kids like this. Fucking assholes. I spent much of my life going to school with them. They are probably rich, given where they went to high school, or if not rich themselves, surrounded by a bunch of rich fucks with whom they had to keep up. I went to high school, and elementary, and middle school with a lot of rich kids and middle class kids whose parents pretended they were rich. I hate them. There are kids I knew then, ten, twenty years ago, who I still hope get in car accidents. There are armies of these assholes all over the place, and they often wind up running things. That's a big part of why shit sucks.

Fuck anyone who tells you to take it with a grain of salt, talks of not letting it affect you. I live with the mental and emotional marks those people inflicted on me from the time I was five years old. You try getting ripped down every day for over ten years and coming out on top.

My partner was watching this very nice video that Ellen DeGeneres made about her reaction to Tyler's suicide. It's also a message to kids like him. In it, she says, "I want anyone out there who feels different and alone to know that I know how you feel." My partner stopped it and started crying. She said that she wished she had someone to tell her that when she was younger. Me too.

And you know what else? I guarantee you that a ton of people who will say, "Oh, that's so terrible, such a tragedy..." will turn around and call someone a faggot five minutes later, or a fucking homo, or say "No homo" or tell someone how "gay" something is. FUCK ALL OF YOU.

Fucking assholes don't get it.

Let's start saying that things we don't like are not just gay, but Puerto Rican, fat, female, black, Chinese, cancerous, have Alzheimer's, fetal alcohol syndrome-ish, autistic, African, poor, Native American, schizophrenic, have eating disorders, Arab, paralyzed, amputated or rape victims.

Fire

Fred Phelps' (of god hates fags fame) people are coming to where I go to school. I don't really know why. Well I know what they are doing, but I don't really get it. I guess god hates Jews too.

I'm not offended by the fact that they are coming to the school I attend. That's irrelevant. It's just that I've been reminded of these people and what they believe and do after a long period of not giving them much thought.

Fuck these people, fuck every one of them. Fuck their religion, fuck their church (Westboro Baptist, from Kansas, just like Operation Rescue), fuck their families, fuck their Walmart lives.

They protested Matthew Shepard's funeral. Because he was gay. He had it coming, they are glad he is dead, and he is in their hell, they say. They protested his funeral, in front of his family. Yup.

Fuck people's liberal attitudes towards them. Sure, people are pissed, but they're going to hold a counter-protest. Oooh. Not that. That's what they want. They want attention. They live on it. They want people to yell at them and tell them they are wrong and how they are not welcome wherever they may be; it only emboldens them. These people thrive on the attention, however negative it may seem. They are sick.

Their sickness is not the type that can be adequately addressed through speech, the written word, or visual mediums. No, these people will only understand violence. That is their language. It is the unofficial language of America, for sure, and they have wholeheartedly embraced it.

As such, the people from the Westboro Baptist Church need to be addressed in the language they understand. Violence, self-defense, keeping the streets safe, keeping them clean, however you choose to construe it.

Are these people "the problem"? No. They are but a grotesque manifestation of the horrors of humanity and the belief system of this society. At the same time, they are a legitimate danger that needs to be addressed, and it will not happen through marches, holding signs, or yelling at them.

People like this need to be afraid to leave their homes. They operate with no fear. Hate groups in this country virtually need never fear retribution, and of course the fact that many politicians support them, whether explicitly or implicitly, and a good number of pigs populate their ranks goes a long way to see to this. They hide behind constitutional rights and the fact that no one legitimately fights them. People have fucking COUNTER-PROTESTS. Seriously? That's what's up? Damn.

"We have the right to say what we want," they say. Sure. But then the people to whom you are saying it have a right to defend themselves against you and your dirty work enforcers when you threaten them, whether the threat be implied or overt. If what you are saying has a history of concomitant violence (lynching black people, killing doctors, beating queer people), then you need to be kept in check and people have every fucking right to do this, through whatever means necessary. People need to realize that. No one needs to lay down and let these people run all over the rights that we all have to be safe. That is a much higher priority than free speech.

Protest and counter-protest are not the same. Their protest = profound bigotry, threatening language, inciting hate, giving strength to the people who go out and perform the actions that their words describe. Counter-protest = telling them that they are wrong. We need more than this. When they have what they are saying and doing coming back to them in kind, then we will see how strongly they still feel the need to say what they want.