What the hell kind of kids are people raising in this country today?

Earlier this week, Pam wrote about what a miserable September it's been for gay youth around the country. Now, late today, comes word that a promising young musician and student at Rutgers University, Tyler Clementi, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and another student videotaped him having sex with a male classmate and posted the video on the Web:

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera hidden in his dormitory room to broadcast the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously filmed — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the second high-profile suicide this year that followed alleged incidents of cyber-bullying. In January, a high school student in South Hadley, Mass., hanged herself in her home after months of reported harassment by a group of students on Web sites and in text messages.

[snip]

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s office said that Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most severe charges carry a maximum sentence of five years in jail.

Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for attempting a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”

There have always been bullies, but nothing like what we see today. What kind of a sick, twisted fuck do you have to be to do something like this?

An added twist to this case is that the two perpetrators of this heinous act of bullying are both minorities. Dharun Ravi appears to be of Indian descent and Molly Wei appears to be of Chinese descent. They are from Plainsboro, NJ, a diverse town in which 16.97% of residents identified as Indian-American in the 2000 census (second only to Edison) and 8.55% self-identified as of Chinese ancestry. It's an affluent town as well, with median family income of $102,586 as of a 2007 estimate. (source) You'd think that a diverse town with a high median income and one of the top school systems in the country wouldn't be raising a bunch of bullies. But then, the haves bullying the have-nots is nothing new, is it.

Not much information about Ravi and Wei has been released as yet, though I suspect that will change. I'm sure that there are those who will be tempted to insist that their own lily-white Anglo-Saxon children would NEVER do something like that, or worse, that because Tyler Clementi was gay, he somehow "deserved it". But those who are tempted to think this should read about Phoebe Prince, a high school student who was bullied into suicide in Massachusetts earlier this year; about Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, or any of the other gay kids who have seen no way out but suicide.

Being bullied is always traumatic for a child or adolescent. Those of us who were small, or fat, or jut plain weird, have always been bullied. But today, when the bullying can take place in front of a huge audience, and when you throw in the anti-gay rhetoric being spouted by right-wing politicians, which gives an imprimatur of approval to homophobic bullying by straight young males who no doubt have issues about their own sexuality and send a signal to gay teens that the very power structures in this country will hound them even if their classmates aren't at the moment, it's not difficult to understand how a young man like Tyler Clementi might be driven to not just talk about jumping off the George Washington Bridge, but actually do it.

To get a sense of how distraught this young man was, consider that Fort Lee, where the bridge is located, is at least an hour drive from Rutgers. How determined do you have to be when you can spend an hour driving and not reconsider? But what's more frightening is what kind of kids are people raising these days that they think surreptitiously videotaping another kid's private activities and posting them without consent is OK? Do kids have NO sense of consequences whatsoever? I don't care what celebrities get away with.

The next time a Congressman or Senator gets up before Congress or goes on a cable news show and talks about the "homosexual agenda", I would hope that they would think about Tyler Clementi -- a talented musician with a brilliant future ahead of him who saw nothing but taunting and persecution in that future and decided it was too high a price to pay and that death looked good by comparison.

Maybe it's because they hear stuff like this

While we shake our heads and wonder where the tormentors of Phoebe Prince get their ideas that bullying is a way to resolve anything, perhaps we should look at a sociopolitical climate where a potential presidential candidate uses the imagery of firearm sights on districts with candidates she wants defeated, and where politicians call people who talk of killing people they disagree with "patriots".

Like this guy:

A 63-year-old Yakima County man has been charged with threatening to kill U.S. Sen. Patty Murray over her support of the health-care overhaul.

The FBI and local police arrested Charles Alan Wilson at his Selah home early Tuesday. He later made an initial appearance in federal court in Yakima on one count of threatening a federal official. He was appointed a public defender and ordered to be kept in custody pending a detention hearing Friday.

According to the charges, staffers in Murray's office in the Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle had become concerned over phone calls by an unknown man in recent months. The calls came from a blocked number and often were made at night or on weekends.

Usually, according to a staffer, the calls were merely vulgar and harassing.

But on March 22, "the caller began to make overt threats to kill and/or injure Senator Murray," according to the complaint signed by FBI Agent Carolyn Woodbury.

In that call, a man the FBI says it has identified as Wilson stated, "I hope you realize there's a target on your back now ... Kill the [expletive] senator! I'll donate the lead."

In several other vulgar and profanity-laced messages left over the next week, the caller repeatedly threatened the Democratic senator's life and said he "hopes somebody kills" President Obama as well, according to portions of transcripts in the complaint.

In a call Sunday evening, according to charging documents filed in federal court, Wilson made reference to being in a group of protesters outside the Red Lion Hotel in Yakima last week when Murray was in town to speak at a Chamber of Commerce event.

Local tea party activists participating in the demonstration held signs protesting the health-care overhaul and equating President Obama's agenda with socialism.

"Yeah, we were outside waiting for you," Wilson said in his voice-mail message, records show.

I, on the other hand, WAS Phoebe Prince

Phoebe Prince haunts me. She haunts me because I WAS Phoebe Prince, or something akin to it when I was a kid. It started pretty early, because I was unusually short, and a bit chubby, and I could read already when I was in first grade and kids would rat me out for "just looking at the words" instead of reading just because I didn't move my lips when I read. It got worse in third grade when the other third grade teacher would scream at me and call me "weakling" because I would cry during dodgeball because kids throwing a big ball at me made me feel paranoid. I was this strange little kid who liked to read instead of climbing trees, who watched The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and drew pictures with the kids in the house at the end of the backyard, who were as weird as I was.

Then in fourth grade there was the boy who hit me on the arm every day. Then in seventh grade it was the boys in the youth group who called me "Zimmerpimple at school." And on and on and on. I was a lonely kid with few friends. A good chunk of the time I sat outside alone in high school at lunchtime writing moody poetry in a blank book. I had friends on occasion, usually kids as weird as I was. It was only when I got involved in community theatre that I had anything approaching a real social circle, and I was always on the periphery of that.

There were always misfits, there always have been. Some of them had the confidence to wear their misfithood proudly. One girl in high school had a beanbag dog she wore on her head all the time. It was a statement. I lacked the confidence to make statements, I just wanted to be like everyone else. I might have been smart and funny, but when you're a kid, and especially in high school, you just want to be pretty and popular.

I think the reason that Phoebe Prince haunts me is the same reason Megan Meier haunted me. These were not short, chubby, funny-looking girls who would be the obvious target of mean girls and mean boys. These were perfectly fine-looking, pretty girls, like any other high school girls, who for some reason became the targets of bullies. Phoebe Prince may have been an immigrant, but she was an immigrant from Ireland, which when I was in my teens would have made her the ultimate pretty shiksa that I envied. From my vantage point at the age of 55, where the scars of having been tormented by the prettier and the thinner and the more confident have long faded but can still come roaring back at vulnerable moments, it's a mystery as to why kids like this are targeted, today in a way that's far more vicious than anything that I experienced.

Attention to the Prince case now focuses on who knew what was going on, who should have known, who should have done something about it, and how. Nine teens are now charged with felonies and the truth about the vile filth that was showered upon Phoebe Prince endured is now coming out. Was it simply that her accent made her different? Was it some kind of anti-immigrant sentiment at home gone mad in these kids? I suppose during the trial of these kids we may learn just what it was about Phoebe Prince that incurred their wrath.

I look at the photos of Phoebe Prince, who looks like any other pretty high school kid, and then I think about the fabulous Gabourey Sidibe, who conforms to no conventional American standard of beauty, but who is cocky and confident and cowers before no one. What is it that makes Gabby Sidibe survive high school and become successful while Phoebe Prince takes her own life?

I can't even begin to imagine what my life would have been like if being a misfit then was the way it is now, where home is no respite because there's cyberbullying and mean girls exercise power by tormenting those they deem unfit because they don't buy their clothes at Hollister or Juicy Couture or whatever the hell the status symbol is these days. I look at my neighbor's seven-year-old, an adorable child with the kind of fiery red hair that so often describes a personality. This child is jaw-droppingly bright and articulate; a conversation with her is like talking to a 40-year-old. Her mother tells me that she too is often thought of as odd by her peers and they are trying to make home a safe, loving place for her. This kid is by any measure, fabulous, and I just hope and pray that her confidence and a loving family is enough to get her through the mean kid minefield that lies ahead of her.

Nation of Bullies

Earlier this week we heard about nine teenagers who have been charged after their bullying of a fifteen-year-old led to the girl's suicide. Last week an eight-year-old in Houston jumped off a balcony at his school because he couldn't take the teasing and bullying anymore.

In the adult world, we're seeing the people who should be teaching kids not to bully other kids spitting on Congressmen, and campaigning by using the rhetoric of gun violence.

With all this going on, it's almost understandable that people no longer care who's right, they just want quiet. Almost. But when you have the kind of simmering rage, threatening to explode into widespread violence at any minute against anyone who disagrees with a small racist minority, it's disturbing to find indpendent voters, those low-information nimrods who dance at whatever new shiny object is dangled in front of them, deciding that the victims of teabagger bullying are as much to blame as those stirring the pot:

A new USA Today/Gallup poll out this morning shows that more Americans blame the Democrats more than any other group when it comes to the inciting the violence and vandalism that have spread across the country in the week since health care reform became law. Fifty percent said passing the bill was a "bad thing," while 47% said it was a good thing.*

When asked about the violence, 49% of the 1,009 adults surveyed over the weekend said the "Democratic tactics" are a "major reason" for the violent incidents. Forty-six percent said conservative media was responsible, and 43% blamed the attacks on the rhetoric of Republican political leaders.

The poll suggests that Americans are warming to the Republican view of the bill and the way it was passed in the days since President Obama signed the historic legislation.

While a widely-cited USA Today/Gallup poll taken the day after the House vote on the bill showed more Americans favored the legislation than opposed it, the poll released today shows that number has flipped back to its pre-passage split.

What this tells us is that there is a not inconsiderable segment of the population which believes that violence is an appropriate action to take against people with whom you have a political disagreement. For eight years, these same people stood by while George Bush and Dick Cheney trampled on the Constitution, lied us into a war, shoveled billions of taxpayer money into the pockets of their cronies, ran the economy off a cliff, spied on Americans, put people who disagreed with them on no-fly lists -- and these independents didn't say a fucking word. Now all of a sudden, the Democrats win an election, pass legislation consistent with that victory, and they are to blame for the death threats against them?

When George Bush swaggered around talking about "Bring 'em on" and "Dead or alive" and invaded countries that did nothing to us, he put a presidential imprimatur on bullying as a legitimate way to settle disagreements. We are still stuck with the Bush Doctrine in more ways than one.