Found in Cambridge, on Mass Ave: the text reads, "If I die / you die"
I’m thinking this morning about the kids who are killing themselves, the kids bullied and done with it, the kids who are either gay or who someone decided must be gay and who got teased, relentlessly. One boy tried to hang himself and was found unconscious in his backyard, another boy hung himself, one boy shot himself, one young man jumped of the George Washington bridge after his fucking roommate secretly used a webcam to video-stream him having sex with another man. That’s just this month, and that’s just the stories that are making the news. We aren’t getting many many other stories, about kids who’ve killed themselves rather than endure one more fucking minute, nor about the kids who are still going through it.
This isn’t about kids not being tough enough, not being able to “man-up” — this is about a terrible hazing, a constant, multi-lateral, multi-faceted hazing into american adult society that we’ve set up and chosen or been forced to participate in, as the bullied, the bully, or the bystander.
