A comment on my last post lead me to the commenter’s website, and he had posted a video from one of my favorite Burners:
There’s so much emotion tied up in the “It Gets Better” project. I’m thankful for Dan Savage starting the project. I’m a straight woman who supports the LGBT community. I support marriage equality for everyone. I support equal rights for LGBT folks. I support the right of all people to live their lives without being harassed for any reason.
The school years are tough until you graduate high school, for everyone. Now that I have years and years of hindsight, it has to be hard for the bullies too or they wouldn’t be hassling those who are different or weaker.
You don’t have to be LGBT to get bullied during middle and high school, but I’d imagine the strong emotions that homophobia can instill in a young brute can make the bullying that much more intense and horrifying. Every bullied teen contemplates suicide, but there has to be some intensity going on if they’re willing to go through with it. The brain has to be pulled out of true to go against its basic animal instinct to survive.
Graduating from high school and moving away from all the cretins who made my life hell was the best thing that ever happened to me. I went on to college and had the best time of my life. My life wasn’t perfect, and there were other growing pains associated with higher education, but nobody was threatening to bust my head in for being different.
The great thing about college is that most everyone there wants to be there. High school is mandatory, college is not. In high school you are exposed to a lot of kids who really don’t want to learn anything, who are willfully attached to their ignorance. After the first year or two the young people who are there because their parents want them to do it drop out.
You’re always going to always run into douchebags during the course of your life, but after high school they’re generally not physically violent. If they are, as an adult you’re able to call the police and file an assault complaint and have the problem dealt with by professionals.
This brings me to a question – why aren’t high school students able to fall back on the law in these bullying cases? A lot of this comes down to stalking and assault, but it’s like we’ve put a label of “bullying” on it, something that’s not legislated, and suddenly it’s just a kid problem. It’s a problem that belongs to all of us.