It’s a cruel, cruel world sometimes.

Call me unrealistic, out of touch, idealistic, crazy, naive, or what have you, but I like to believe that most people are mostly decent, most of the time.  Maybe it’s an idea from childhood that I cling to, as my saintly grandmother drilled into me that people are good, just misguided sometimes.  It could be that I actually bought into that whole golden rule thing in first grade and it stuck.  Or that I just listened to “Heal the World” and “We Are the World” (original version only, of course) a few too many times.  I’ve never tried to prove that most people are mostly decent, most of the time and have no way of doing so.  It’s just a belief that helps me sleep at night.  Well, most nights.  

Sometimes I’m reminded just how mean the world–meaning the people in it–can be, and often these reminders come in the form of a cold, hard slap across the kisser.  

As a rule, I’m not much of a crier; I rarely shed tears and can’t actually remember the last time I full-on ugly cried.  However, the past several days have been so emotionally trying that I’ve actually fogged over twice–more tears than I shed in all of 2009.   If you’re wondering what happened, it’s simple:  I read the news.  

Last week a student asked if I had seen the news about the young man at Rutgers who jumped off the George Washington Bridge as a result of a private, sexual encounter with another man being played on the internet by two fellow students without his knowledge.  When I said that I had not heard about it, the student said that this was only the latest in a rash of queer youth suicides in the past week, and part of a larger trend of cyber-bullying.  The student was visibly upset, so I fired up the ol’ Google search engine and started reading about Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student, and then about the other recent queer youth suicides.  What I found was beyond horrifying.  

I spent part of my afternoon reading news stories and accounts of several queer youths who had been, quite seriously, bullied to death via suicide.  I had heard about cyber-bullying as a result of Phoebe Prince’s suicide, but didn’t really pay much attention.  As it turns out, to use the words of Vice President Biden, it’s a big f*&^ing deal.  

I know that bullying is not a new phenomenon, that this is something generations (that’s a modest estimate, as I have no idea how far back this goes in human history) of people have dealt with, often it seems during that already awkward and completely confusing period of life known as adolescence.  I also know that teen suicide and among queer youths especially, is unfortunately not unusual either.  What I didn’t realize was that the connection between the two was so strong.  

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported for high school students in 2007, 18.7% of females and 10.3% of males considered suicide, 13.4% of females and 9.2% of males planned suicide, and 9.3% of females and 4.6% of males attempted suicide.  What’s even more upsetting is that students who had been threatened with or subjected to physical violence (common forms of bullying) were 2.4 times more likely to have suicidal thoughts and 3.3 times more likely to report suicidal behavior than those who hadn’t been victimized.   

Upset yet?  Yeah, me too.  

One thing I cannot get my head around is how people can be so cruel to one another.  I don’t just mean kids (who, by the way, learn that behavior somewhere), who can be plenty cruel, but adults too.  The Rutgers students responsible for uploading the video that lead to Tyler Clementi’s suicide were young adults, as are the adults that often complicit in the bullying of others.  Whether this participation is through ignoring it, as has been the message and reports from parents of bullied children in the wake of Prince’s death, or in their outright condoning and participation in the bullying of others, such as Lori Drew in the Megan Meier case, these are adults making these decisions.  

How, how, how have we as a people let this happen over and over?  Seems like all evidence is to the contrary of my most people are mostly decent hypothesis.  

I would love to think that maybe these kids just need a good long run or some other form of distraction to make them feel better and put things into perspective, but I honestly don’t think that has a snowball’s chance at the equator of working.  A few weeks ago I wrote about my own comparatively minor anxieties and that while usually running helps sometimes there just aren’t enough miles you can do to distract yourself.   I can’t even imagine the pain, isolation, fear, and despair these individuals are going through, so I can’t imagine that something like a good run would even dent the cruelty of the situation, as much as I wish it could.  

Fortunately, there are people like Dan Savage  and who are trying to make a difference for some of these youths and prevent more tragedies like some of these.  Please support his cause and others like it, because from these stories I know that the heartbreak I feel right now is nothing compared to what these youths are going through.  

Of course, if you know or suspect someone is being bullied or is contemplating suicide, speak up.  The suicide prevention hotline is one resource, as is the Boys Town hotline.  

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