Great article by William Rivers Pitt reflects on the love that seems to be missing in a country where:
Five gay teenagers - Tyler Clementi, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, Asher Brown and Seth Walsh - killed themselves in the last month after enduring a sustained onslaught of bullying because they were gay. A Town Supervisor in New York wants bodies removed from a local cemetery because the deceased were Muslim. Tea Partiers in Medicare-funded scooters want to annihilate funding for the care of other people's woes, because those other people are not them.
Earlier this year, Pitt disclosed his own experience of bullying in his post at truthout, Here There Be Monsters:
When I was 13, the daily violence I endured had reached a terrible peak. My grades were failing, I was withdrawing even further from the world, and my school's response to the ongoing harassment was to give the students a lecture about chickens and the "pecking order." To wit, when one chicken develops a bloody spot from an injury, the other chickens swarm the wounded one and peck that bloody spot until the wounded bird is killed. The principal admonished the student body to not be like those chickens. The end result of the lecture was that my tormentors would punch me as hard as they could whenever they saw me and yell, "Peck!"
After an especially brutal day of torture at the hands of classmates, Pitt says it all got to be too much:
I went home after school and gobbled a full bottle of pills. I lost my nerve a few minutes later, made myself throw up, and drank as much water as my stomach could hold, but the drugs had already entered my system. For the next two days, I laid in a semi-delirious stupor which my mother believed was a bad flu. I did not tell her about what really happened that day until many years later, and have told very few others about it until now.
I like his article today (Come Wake Me Up) because he ties the hateful behavior that is being enacted on so many fronts -- hatred that he has personally experienced -- to the inherent inclusiveness of both love and the political foundations of our nation:
America is hard. Nowhere in human history has any place made the deliberate choice to take all comers, to throw open the doors to any and all who want something better and are willing to play by the rules...probably because doing so is an invitation to bedlam.
"All we have in common," suggests Pitt, "are a few old pieces of parchment telling us our primary right is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
He goes on to make a good case that, ultimately, love may be the glue that allows us to stay with the chaos but hold ourselves together in a more civil society. Read the whole article here.
