This is the greatest PSA you will ever see

I'm sure you can imagine that the Tyler Clementi story is getting a fair amount of press over here in suburban New Jersey. Any Rutgers story is of local interest, for all that Rutgers is a fair distance southwest of here. And since Tyler Clementi had just graduated from Ridgewood High School this year (which makes the story even more horrifying), it truly is a local story.

Clementi isn't the first suicide of a gay teen this year, or even this quarter, but for some reason, like the suicide of Phoebe Prince, it haunts me, as I'm sure it does everyone who has vivid memories of being bullied for being gay, or fat, or weird, or just plain different.

And so I have to give kudos to Dan Savage for the It Gets Better project. I don't know if kids watching Dan and his partner Terry talk about how they endured bullying too, but that once you leave high school, it gets better, will believe it any more than kids like I was believed their parents when they told us that someday the campus queens would be old and mean and ugly but a good heart and a flair for comedy lasts forever. But I have to give him props for at least trying (even if Tyler Clementi found that sometimes it takes longer than graduating high school for it to get better):