My Google news brought up this article. Students protest hate speech with ‘Day of Silence'
It ends with this:
In the past year, hate speech has also been highlighted in Massachusetts bullying cases which ultimately led to student suicides. Though he did not identify as gay, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a sixth-grader at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield was repeatedly taunted with anti-gay slurs and endured other forms of bullying. He hung himself at his home with an extension cord last April.
That got me thinking. Why commit suicide? That seems rather dumb. It's a surrender, a submission to those who are wronging them. If you're going to kill someone, kill someone more likely to be the problem: the other people. I'm not advocating killing every 6th grader who ever called someone gay, since then there would be no 7th grade the next year, and so on until humanity is gone. I am suggesting though, that if this were say, 10 years later and the people in question are in their 20s rather than 12; that by then people should have outgrown their "everyone is gay" phase. If you're going to commit suicide, don't, take down the people who are the problem instead.
Same as in those shitty oppressive culture where women are abused and neglected and sometimes kill themselves to get away, or do nothing and eventually are killed for some petty offense like "exposed eyelid in public." The world would be a better place if those women either refused to die and tried to escape or accepted death and made it useful, taking a queue from the suicide bombers, except fighting for something worthwhile. Or at least die for a useful crime like "cut off everyone's balls and eliminated the next generation."
Of course the ideal would be no suicide, no murder, and no defocused hatred:homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.
2 comments:
It strikes me that depression leading to suicide may also tie into another feeling: that of being powerless. Nothing you can say or do can effectively change your circumstances and the emotional pain is too great to take any more. For some that have achieved anything in their life, from good grades to friends to and active social life, it can be very difficult to comprehend the magnitude of that feeling.
I wonder if this could be a reason why suicide is much more common amongst Men than Women: mens self-worth based on more tangible benchmarks (pay, product ownership, sexual relationships etc.) Not attaining these mean that you're a failure in your own eyes. Controversial call.
You raise something that I am amazed I forgot. Helplessness is a big problem. Perhaps even worse is a sense that the only thing they control is their death.
The difference likely has more to do with how they deal with emotion: women get depressed more often (consider they can have all the life-failure that men can in this new, liberated age, but also much more socially-induced depression), but since they are more socially minded they have greater support and are less likely to commit such a selfish act. Suicide is incredibly selfish, causing huge amounts of disruption and grief for those they are connected to; the exception being someone who is completely cut off from the world, but these are rare; most people who think they're isolated and alone are much less so than they think.
Also women suck at killing themselves. No really, science backs me up.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/11/981112075159.htm
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