Clementi, a Rutgers freshman, jumped off the George Washington bridge last week. His body was recovered today, on the 29th.
He told us he was going to do it; he posted his plans on his facebook page earlier that evening.
Technically, Clementi did take his own life. We didn't push him off the bridge. Technically, we were sleeping, or working, or laughing with our significant other, or watching Jersey Shore, or chomping down McNuggets, or doing a million other things that didn't directly murder the fragile young man.
And you can be certain he was a tortured guy on the inside, because it takes that type of person to jump.
But we still killed him.
43 percent of us believe gay sex is morally wrong. (Poll results here.)
58 percent of us don't want to allow gays to marry. (Poll results here.)
Upwards of 90 percent of us watch videos online, including everything from Euro soccer highlights to dancing babies to classical music to Anime porn. Susan Boyle's audition for "Britain's Got Talent" garnered 100 million hits in its first nine days. It's not just because she's got talent and is British.
So when Clementi's roommate secretly filmed him having sex with another man, then posted it online, the twig he was... it just snapped.
At the intersection of omnipresent technology, voyeurism, homophobia, curiosity and immaturity, we find Clementi.
That's our address. We killed him.
And he didn't have to die. We could be a better society already, one that allows gay men and women to love each other openly in the same way straight men and women do. But we aren't. We could be a different society, one that places certain loose restrictions on online content. But again, we aren't. We could even be living in an age without the Internet. But we have it.
Indisputably, we could nurture troubled teenagers better.
Instead, when the planet dumps a Clementi in our lap, we kill him.
What ultimately killed Clementi, and I just heard about it today in Spain, was the idea that people, who identify as gay, can be put on display. Heteros having sex in the dorm room is c'est la vie and oftentimes profitable. But two men or two women...this is a spectacle in many hetero eyes. What would any of us do if we were put on display, mocked as an inferior, belittled because we looked, acted, spoke, felt differently.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there are laws under which the "videographer" can be prosecuted for videotaping two unconsenting people.
It is sad when anyone feels the need to take his or her life, but when it is because s/he is being mocked for being gay or black or fat or different in anyway that heteros/anglos/the skinny are allowed to act everyday of their lives, it is especially sad. And I would agree, we let it happen to some degree.
Fonda-
ReplyDeleteThere's quite a bit of talk about charges for the guy who posted the video.
We didn't just "let it happen." The circumstances we live in made it inevitable that something like this would occur over and over, and not always internationally publicized. The sad fact is that we've crafted ourselves a society where gay sex is an avenue to heap scorn and ridicule on someone. Once we get that part of our society fixed, we can stop killing Clementis.