Kiss Me, I'm Irate

(This post is one of a series about queer suicide and what we can do about it)

Starting things off with a post about society that follows, I think, pretty easily from why I’m writing this series. It’s about bullying. Obviously.

If you go back and look up some of the names Rise Against quoted – Billy Lucas, Tyler Clementi, Harrison Chase Brown, Cody Walker, Seth Walsh – you’ll find one common thread that binds all the stories together. To a one, they were targets of bullying. Frequently, whether they were out or not, about sexuality, and it’s no wonder – nobody laughs at glasses anymore, “nerd” is a badge of honor, “nigger” would get you detention and besides was never a way to insult white kids, and if you can’t make fun of their weight you might as well call the kid a fag. Or gay (such a versatile form of abuse, it even comes in adjective!). At least I assume that’s why it’s popular, I can’t work anything else out. Well, that’s not true. More on that later.

It’s really a grotesquely amazing thing. Hell with baseball, bullying is a national pastime. Yet it’s something we don’t recognize as a problem. Responses vary: “boys will be boys” (or “kids will be kids”) is a popular one, with the ever-popular “they’re just kids messing around” right beside it; “it’s good for them, toughens them up”; “don’t be a tattle-tale”; on some level, some people just can’t or don’t want to believe kids can be vicious little fucks; and some people, I think, just don’t know what to do with it because they’re still afraid, still have internalized an inferiority to people who are more arrogant and aggressive and well, mean.

The worst thing we can do about bullying, though, is ignore it. And yet, that seems to be the popular option – you know, ignore the bullies and they’ll go away. Pretend you aren’t hurt, because if you are it’s your fault for not being strong enough (yeah, “people have no power over you except what you give them”, what a load of shit). And, all together now, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”.

Look, it’s not working. In studies cited by a Department of Justice article (published in 1998, good thing we paid attention and have been working on it… oh wait), 77 percent of people report being a victim of bullying, and 1 in 4 school kids reported being repeatedly bullied over the last three months.

Silence is a worse answer than violence. Ignoring bullies doesn’t stop them – it encourages them. Bullying is a power play – beat up on someone smaller because it feels good. And it sure as hell doesn’t help the victims – the DoJ article says it well:

Students who are chronic victims of bullying experience more physical and psychological problems than their peers who are not harassed by other children and they tend not to grow out of the role of victim. Longitudinal studies have found that victims of bullying in early grades also reported being bullied several years later. Studies also suggest that chronically victimized students may as adults be at increased risk for depression, poor self-esteem, and other mental health problems, including schizophrenia.

Ignoring bullies doesn’t stop any of this, and telling kids that it will stop if they ignore bullies or that they’re always responsible for how they feel tells them it’s their fault that it continues. And often they’ll get more of the same if they go to the nearest authority figure, or bullies will redouble the abuse they pile on them. ‘cos, you know, nobody likes a tattle.

Victim blaming. It is the worst message.

That article there, by the way, talks about how bullying has long-term negative affects for bullies too. It’s required reading.

So, it’s a largely ignored problem and society at large absolutely fails at giving kids the tools to deal with it, or doing much of anything about it at all. This is a topic I’ve wanted to write about publicly for a long time; I’ll be honest, I’m probably projecting a bit. Though I might prefer “speaking from experience”.

So how is this specifically related to queer folk?

There’s two things kids know they can get away with calling people as general-purpose insults – fat and gay. Using gay as a general-purpose insult (even not to people) has its own problems, and that’s the next post, but when you’re making fun of people, it’s indispensable. Particularly in areas like Tennessee or Michele Bachmann’s district where school authorities aren’t allowed to stand up for queer folk. Making fun of weight is problematic too, but it’s even harder to get away with because we as a society have pulled our collective head out of our collective ass and recognized it causes things like eating disorders, and depression, and oh right self harm and suicide.

And where do queer kids turn? School administrators, who in many areas are likely to tell them aw, that’s too bad, but maybe you should stop living in sin? Their conservative Christian parents who they fear coming out to because of their upbringing in a church that preached the evils of the gays? Certainly not, then, their pastor, or other adults they know from church. It makes the effects of abuse so much more acute when the victim feels they have nowhere to turn.

“Gay” and “fag” are the weapon of choice – can you imagine if it was “nigger”?

I don’t know how all to fix this, but I do (naturally) have some ideas.

I know part of the answer is legislative – there needs to be federal legislation to require recognition and support of sexuality and gender identity by public schools, and to require proven intervention-based anti-bullying programs. It needs to be federal because you’ll never get such a thing done in many states (read: the Bible Belt) given they’re busy passing legislation defining queer folk as a subjugated class. Of course it will never happen at the federal level with Republicans (or to be fair, a significant but shrinking number of Democrats) in power either – but politics is for later.

When it comes down to it the fix is sociological. The problem is widespread heterosexism and cissexism, and they are deeply ingrained in society – into our culture, our politics, our religion. In my next posts I’ll go down those rabbit holes, from my perspective. At some point I’ll make a post about definitions too because I know some of the words I’m using aren’t exactly common parlance.

But right now, I’m eating dinner.

One year ago this week – National Suicide Prevention Week, then and now – a 15 year old kid in Indiana named Billy Lucas hung himself.

Evidence suggests because he was bullied for his sexuality.

It touched off what I’m going to call a lesser media frenzy. Not a big one – kids killing themselves isn’t as glamorous as adults killing each other – but for a while there, the media paid attention, and Lucas’ death and four others like his were widely documented. One pro-equality blog, The New Civil Rights Movement, believes they found another four or five that were less widely documented in a post titled There Were A Lot More Than 5.

The fact is, though, there were probably a lot more than ten, not counting suicide attempts and people standing on that edge. And although the press coverage died down when the reporters moved on, like they do – let’s see, September, October… oh right, election season – the suicides didn’t.

These weren’t isolated incidents. It wasn’t a freak coincidence, or a bunch of copycats. It’s a paint-by-numbers epidemic, and these are the numbers that paint the story: gay teens, who by all accounts make up less than 10% of the population, account for a third of teen suicides. One in three adult gay men report attempting suicide at one point in their lives. The numbers are lower for lesbians, and skyrocket for transgender people. I haven’t seen any statistics specifically about bisexuals, but now that researchers have grudgingly accepted that we exist they can maybe get on that.

This month I’m going to be a bit more active with this blog. Not as active as I want to be sometimes, but I’ll at least be making a post a week and I may make others as I feel like it. The three topics I have roughly planned out are religion, politics, and society. Probably a lot of mixing those, gods know they’re inseparable in the US. The latter two may also explode into multi-post topics.

Caveat lector – I’m angry, and I’m afraid (not for myself – I’m fine, Mom ), and that makes me mean. If you’re religious, Republican, or just heterosexist/cissexist, I am going to offend you. I will be truthful and I will try to be fair, but I will not pull punches. If they hurt maybe it’s time for some introspection. I may even be vulgar.

On the off chance anyone was wondering, yes, the title of this post is taken from the subtitle of the Rise Against song Make It Stop. Which, while I get more of a “Sunday Bloody Sunday” vibe from the whole thing than “Prayer of the Refugee”, is one of my favorite It Gets Better videos.

This is a public service announcement for sysadmins.

Ping is crap.

I see in my current job, and I saw in my previous one, people using ping to check whether their webservers, database servers, whatever are up, or even if a network path is working. And I usually comment on it because it’s my job to fix problems, even if they’re tangential to what was called in.

There are… problems with this.

Some people just don’t pass pings. What happens when middle management decides the ability to enumerate the few hardened hosts you have exposed publicly is a credible risk?

Ping won’t tell you if your httpd is even alive. Or your DB daemon, whatever it is. If it’s a web app, a ping sure as hell won’t tell you if that’s actually working.

Also, if you’re checking from a remote location pings will cause false positives. ICMP is lowest-priority traffic unless someone has a messed up QoS policy. Pings will drop, at some point.

It takes work to write a robust health check. I know. I troubleshoot them. But trust me, it’s worth it. You’ll get less false failures, but far more importantly you’ll get a lot less false passes.

So it’s LGBTetc pride month, officially. Though it’s been Pride month for decades it was first recognized nationally by Bill Clinton in 2000, predictably ignored for the next eight years while a Republican held the White House, and has been recognized by Obama for the last three. Pride weekend, as official as there is one (it’s when the SF Pride parade and many others are held) is coming up, timed to commemorate the Stonewall riots. Like the month itself.

And sure enough, around this time of year there are always people asking questions like “why isn’t there a straight pride parade?” Thing is, there is – every other day, on every other street.

I don’t think it’s a stupid question. Not really. Straight people notice under-representation of queer folk like white people notice there aren’t any black people on Gilligan’s Island: to wit, I hadn’t until now. Literally, as I type this. Just hadn’t thought about it. You want a more contemporary example, movie leads. You want one that isn’t about race, look at gender disparity in movie leads or the Bechdel test (not meant to be a meaningful test of anything in particular, but it makes one point very well). The core privilege of majority is not realizing what that means.

There’s some real irony when people say “I don’t mind gays, I just don’t want them rubbing it in my face”.

Let’s keep going with movies. Name ten mainstream romantic comedies in the last two years with a queer couple as the centerpiece. Now name two with a male gay couple. Admittedly I don’t pay much attention to cinema but I’m pretty sure there were more romantic comedies about a guy falling in love with a sex toy in the last five years than about two men falling in love: one. You can’t get through an evening of primetime without seeing a dozen straight couples, half of them involving a main character. Don’t get me started on reality TV. Glee has one gay character and holy fucking shit it’s time for an evangelical jihad.

Advertising. What isn’t advertised with straight couples? Every damn personal product is, especially for men – you ever seen a Aqua Velva commercial? Gillette? It ain’t a disembodied hand stroking some guy’s cheek. Old Spice too, though I’m not about to complain about The Man Your Man Could Smell Like because, hell, it was hilarious. Hell, Pop-Tarts advertise that way – everybody’s racing out the door and grabs their sugar tarts for breakfast: the kids (two, natch) and mom and dad (it’s always mom and dad). Except mom isn’t racing out the door, but that’s another can of worms. Queer couples? You only see lesbians in advertising because they’re fetishized and Unilever wants to sell Axe, and if you see two gay men in an ad being close it’s probably an ad for a bathhouse or a fetish club. Transgender or genderqueer people? If it ain’t porn, good luck with that.

And it’s not just pop culture. It’s about history too. Alan Turing is the father of modern computing and one of the greatest cryptanalyists in history – he devised a base mathematical model for a general-purpose computer, he designed the bombe (the device which cracked the German Enigma cipher in WWII), and he designed the gold standard of AI – the typically-misquoted Turing Test. But most people don’t know the Turing behind the Turing Test was gay, and was driven to suicide for it by the British government in the early 50s. Some historians posit James Buchanan was gay, though the evidence is sketchy and it’s not like we can ask. A comparison could be drawn here to Black History Month and Women’s Studies – and I think it’s a fair one, though some would disagree. Either way I say they’re important in the exact same way.

So who’s rubbing what in whose face?

It is, in the grand scheme, why the It Gets Better Project is important – it’s not just about bullying, it’s also the biggest current iteration of “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”. I think it explains my point better than anything – “you are not alone” is a powerful message, and an important one.

It’s why pride is important, and it’s why Pride is important.

This will only make sense if you’ve heard of Uganda’s “Kill The Gays” bill. Long story short, there’s a bill getting rammed through Parliament in Uganda that will make homosexuality punishable by death, along with jail time for anyone who knows about someone who is gay and does not report them to the authorities within 24 hours. It looked dead back in March, but it’s been put back on the agenda after an evangelical pastor and an MP who told a journalist he wants to “kill every last gay person” presented the Speaker of the Parliament with what they claimed was a petition carrying two million signatures in support of the bill. The link has more info than I do, and it’ll take you down the rabbit hole of the history of the bill if you so choose. Anyway.

Predictably, I’m kind of the opposite of thrilled by this. I decided I want to do something about it.

There’s maybe not a lot one angry American can do in Uganda. I signed a couple of online petitions, for what it’s worth – not much I fear, given the homophobes leading this assault on LGBT people have spent a lot of time telling people homosexuality is an “import from the West”, playing on nationalism (when the real import is religion-driven homophobia).

But there’s one thing I can do that might have some effect, and that’s writing to my representatives in the US Government. And while they might not listen to me, they’ll listen if a lot of people do it (that’s me passive-aggressively calling for a letter campaign).

I know what I want from the federal government: I want sanctions against Uganda if this passes, and I want the US to get behind the call for international (and UN) sanctions. I want immediate, retroactive asylum for Ugandan LGBT refugees, including the protection of the US embassy to the extent possible for those who are not able to flee the country. And I want the US to support the trial of those behind this act of genocide for crimes against humanity.

I don’t know that any of this will happen, especially with Republicans having any kind of power. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to ask for it. Over the next couple of days or so I’m going to draft a letter to President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Representative McDermott, and Senators Murray and Cantwell doing just that, and I’ll post it here and mail it when I’m done regardless of whether the Kill The Gays bill passes or not.

So this is where I ask you, dear reader, to do the same. Write your own, tweak mine, copy it, I don’t care. E-mail, mail, phone, tweet, facebook the people who represent you in government. And spread the word. Together we can make a difference.

If you watched Glee earlier this week, or if you watched the NBA playoffs, you’ve seen this video. It’s an ad for Google Chrome, and it incorporates websites, blog posts, news articles, and yes, YouTube videos about or related to the It Gets Better Project. It’s well-made, it’s powerful, and it brings me to tears every time. You know, in a good way.

I’ve seen some people express a concern that Google is exploiting the emotions of LGBT people and allies. I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. The ad is very emotional, and that’s very much the hook. Google is no stranger to other ways of catching attention – they’ve run Chrome ads that were just silly or all science-y with slow-motion and Mythbusters-esque contraptions.

But you know… if all they wanted to do was use emotion as a hook they’d have just done that. They did it for their 2010 Superbowl ad, and just before the It Gets Better ad they released an ad with a father making his daughter a baby book (or whatever you call it) of sorts through email. But they didn’t – they made a mashup of It Gets Better videos and paid to put it on the air during the NBA playoffs and probably the most popular show on primetime (well, up there). And they did it knowing it would piss some people off (there’s an implied message to social conservatives here: we don’t need you, and we don’t want you – you don’t matter).

Sure, because of that their ad reached a lot of people it wouldn’t have otherwise. Maybe that is kind of exploiting people. But for me it comes down to this:

Google just made (I am fairly sure) the largest national ad buy in support of LGBT people to date, and probably helped the It Gets Better Project reach people they never could have otherwise. I literally could not care less why.

That’s a line I never thought I’d write.

But I’m not talking about the food. I’m talking about the people and the policies. I’m talking about an incident that took place recently. And I’m putting a trigger warning on the rest of this post.

This story broke Friday afternoon. If you don’t pay attention to the LGBT blogosphere you probably haven’t heard about it – stories about trans folk don’t usually get much media attention, and besides that, as every Sorkin fan knows, Friday is trash day.

You can find the full story at that link, but in summary, a transgender woman was beaten to the point of apparently having a seizure by two women at a McDonald’s in Baltimore County. There is video of the incident taken and posted to Youtube (later pulled, but not before others saved it) by an employee. The video shows a handful of employees standing idly watching. A manager halfheartedly tries to intervene a couple of times and another customer (an older woman) also tries to intervene at one point only to very nearly be attacked herself.

There is now a campaign to get McDonald’s to publicly condemn the actions of said employees (all of them present there and not intervening) and fire them. There’s one small problem with this campaign.

They did the right thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If another customer present had intervened, I’d have said they did the right thing too (speaking of, the older woman deserves a medal). I’d have said someone else did the right thing if they brandished a weapon. I also say the people who did not get involved did not do wrong (nor did they do right, but it is not a person’s responsibility to throw themselves into someone else’s fight) but I can understand that being controversial.

Employees are not, however, just someone else. When they’re on shift, the employer is responsible for their behavior – and their safety. If they get involved, they become a liability. For many companies, even their security staff has a no-touch rule – somebody walks out of the store with merch or robs a cash register, you do not physically intervene. You do and they get injured, they can now sue the company. You do and you get injured, the company is now responsible for workers’ comp.

I’m not defending their reasons for not intervening, and there is, I think, a line that gets crossed when it is appropriate for employees to intervene – and I think a hate crime is way past that. But it doesn’t automatically become their responsibility to do so.

I can’t speak to or defend their reasons for not intervening – although, the man who took and posted the video proceeded to very publicly trash the victim on his facebook and twitter accounts (ironically providing corroboration for this being a hate crime – bigots can be such useful idiots sometimes). I know why he didn’t intervene based on that, but I can’t speak for the other employees. And I can’t, from a standpoint of “should they be fired”, say they acted in the wrong way.

I’m not defending the individuals – I’m categorically defending employees for doing very likely exactly as they were told (we didn’t see before the start of the video – even in addition to training and policy I wouldn’t be surprised if the manager had told them something along the lines of “keep back, let me handle this”). And I’m defending McDonald’s for not firing them.

And to the 5500 (and counting) people who have signed an online petition to get the employees (and one might assume bystanders) present to be held legally responsible (how one would go about this baffles me): two people committed a crime. You cannot hold people responsible for not engaging in vigilantism. I get where you’re coming from – I watched the same video, I saw the same lynching, and I’m not thrilled that no one stopped it. Let’s not have another one, okay?

So in a post yesterday I described advocating requiring people to pass a naturalization test to attain birthright citizenship as the most singularly ignorant thing I had seen the author of that statement say.

In a post today, I explain why.

Citizenship is a powerful legal status; it affords a plethora of rights and responsibilities in both national and international law. Jury duty. Military service (the right to serve voluntarily, the responsibility to serve if, in US parlance, drafted). Yes, voting. The right to move freely, without being tracked as an alien, within one’s home country. The right to return to one’s home country – this irrevocably granted by international law, and not necessarily afforded mere residents.

The reasons I have a problem with this concept are much the same as explained in my last post. Namely that not everyone would have the same opportunity to achieve citizenship, and it is wrong to deny those rights to people for no reason other than… well. Because they’re not normative. Not common. Or for whatever reason – through no fault of their own – just not able to attain citizenship.

Restricting voting rights through a literacy test of sorts – that’s stupid. Ignorant. But at least there’s reasoning behind it, even if it is flawed.

Denying birthright citizenship through the same method… there’s just no rhyme or reason, the only thing it accomplishes is screwing people over, disproportionately weighted against minorities and the less fortunate (and no, this isn’t a euphemism for the poor, I mean it literally).

So if that’s your goal… well, the rest of us and the Constitution are likely to have something to say about it, but I suppose you’re welcome to try.

There’s been an opinion piece published by CNN floating around lately. The postulate it starts from is simple, and easy to swallow: the problem with politics in this country is ignorance. There are piles of other problems, to be sure, but they’re symptoms. If the populace – specifically the part who cast their votes – were less prone to be swayed by flashy graphics and sound bytes and following leaders and more prone to educate themselves and know the facts, the country (and the Congress) would be a better place. Now that’s awfully conceited – I won’t deny it – and it would be a lie to say we aren’t all in the first group to some extent. It’s human nature to have pet causes and think what we already think is right.

Anyway, LZ Granderson thinks he has a solution. Don’t let ignorant people vote. And how to accomplish this? Make passing a test similar to the one required for naturalization required for voter registration. A literacy test, if you will.

Seems like an alright idea, on the surface. And it’s no wonder it’s popular. Everyone knows that people would vote better if they were more educated about the issues. Well educated people can’t seem to agree on what exactly that means, but let’s not let details get in the way of our fantasy. One acquaintance I was talking with on twitter even advocates a similar test for citizenship – for people born on US soil.

It was, ironically, the most singularly ignorant thing I have ever seen him say. But citizenship isn’t the point here.

The problem is – what’s ignorant? What’s educated? What’s intelligent? The naturalization test? It’s information that every American should know, certainly, but knowing that Jim McDermott is my Representative, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell are my Senators, Christine Gregoire is my governor, and Quinalt is a Native American tribe doesn’t say a damn thing about current issues – about my ability to make an informed decision come November. And one’s ability to speak English certainly has no bearing on that (seriously – ballots are printed in like 15 languages for this exact reason). So how do you test that?

Do you test on knowledge of the facts of current issues? As I said above, well-educated people – very well-educated people – can’t even agree. Now, there is consensus on some issues – maybe if we made sure voters weren’t ignorant we wouldn’t have to deal with climate change deniers, creationists, and people who build their campaigns on homophobia – but I can’t think of any others and outside of experts in the field (climatologists, um… scientists, and psychologists, respectively) there are many otherwise educated people who hold opinions on those issues which are… well, wrong. Run with that and try to form a consensus in more fields and… well, who’s next on the chopping block? Keynesian economists, or Austrian? Pro-choice, or anti-? Pro-war, or anti-? Stick anything in there, really, you won’t find a consensus.

And that’s all assuming it is in fact a good idea. Brainstorming how you could possibly write such a test. Admittedly not trying very hard, but the exercise is futile anyway – were such a test something one could construct, it would be a bad idea. It’s no mistake I chose the phrase “literacy test”. You could say I’m playing politics, and you’d be right, and you could maybe say I’m proving Granderson’s point – but I say I’m providing a much-needed reminder of historical context.

Barriers to voting – regardless of form, from literacy tests and other Jim Crow laws like the “Grandfather Clause” to explicit gender, race, or land ownership (read: wealth) restrictions – are a tool to keep those in power that way, and those without power that way. And you can bet that reinstating them will have disproportionate effects on minorities. Both those that one might traditionally identify as minorities – racial minorities, women, the poor – and those sociological minorities that are not as widely known or recognized – the disabled, the neuro-atypical (from ADD to autism to OCD and an alphabet soup of personality types and disorders), LGBTQ etc folk (another alphabet soup), people who don’t conform to typical expectations (of gender expression, of monogamy, of dress style)… anyone that whoever has the most power can other.

The only way that earning the right to vote could even potentially be a good idea is if every person has an equal opportunity to earn that right – and it is extraordinarily ignorant to believe that is the case. So Mr. Granderson – by your own ideals, you might want to recuse yourself come next fall.

The strength of this country is in giving voice to the voiceless. For all the flak we take (most of it from ourselves) for being a litigious society, if you feel you’ve been wronged you can have your day in court. Anyone has the same right to make their speech heard, even if not the opportunity – infuriating and on some level depressing as the man with a “god hates fags” sign in the crowd at a Pride parade may be, I have every right to picket a church if I so choose (I do not, but that’s beside the point) – and every right to stand in front of him with a bigger sign and a louder bullhorn.

There is no more fundamental way to make one’s voice heard in a democracy than to cast a vote.

For better or for worse – and I’ll not challenge it’s sometimes for worse – in this country, every person has a vote. And that is how it needs to stay.

facebook awareness campaigns suck. Usually. Sorry if you’re one of those who feel proud of your Disney profile pic, but you’re being silly.

Don’t get me wrong, awareness is important. It means people know, and knowing is half the battle. But it’s a first step. You know about a problem, good for you. Now what are you going to do about it? Call your congresspeople? Donate to Susan G. Komen for the Cure? To the Lance Armstrong Foundation? The Trevor Project? (I’m not saying you don’t care if you don’t donate.) At least make an effort to actually raise awareness, for issues where that’s useful? Or are you just going to post some cryptic nonsense and change your profile picture?

There’s a word for doing… well, nothing, ultimately: slacktivism. It means you post once, maybe twice, some saying on your wall and then forget about it. You don’t engage anyone, you don’t actually try to raise awareness, you don’t campaign or lobby or rally or donate, you just sit down and feel good for doing the same thing as everyone else (there’s a word for that, too…). We’re all guilty of it these days. Just recognize that. Now, again, there are things for which awareness alone is useful – breast cancer can be one (as long as you’re raising awareness of self-screening or whatever you call it – it’s an important thing to catch early), and one I’ve participated in – the fight against LGBT teen suicide – is another. There are things that can be helped – not solved, but helped – just by people knowing about them and thinking about them.

Utility of awareness aside, one other thing: there are awareness campaigns that raise awareness, and then there are those that are just plain stupid. “I like it on the floor”. Good for you, you’ve discovered innuendo! “I like red”. Excellent, now when I buy all my family and facebook friends lingerie I know what color to get! Seriously, those were in no way useful awareness campaigns – not even if the sole purpose was to raise awareness. The only way someone would know what they were about is because they read about them somewhere else. Which completely defeats the purpose.

You want a case study in counterproductive slacktivism, look at the campaign that prompted this post. You’ve all seen it, given this is published to facebook a number of readers may have participated. This campaign is so bad I’m half convinced it started on /b/ because much that has followed from it is funny in a twisted sort of way. That and it’s tailor-made slacktivism – play off an already popular meme (everybody loves to hate pedophiles (there’s a lot more to child abuse than sexual abuse but we all know that’s what made this popular)) that’s coupled with a frankly exaggerated fear, throw in a status update that’s more chain letter than retweet, and add an endearing feature like, oh, cartoons from your childhood. Recipe for going viral, right there.

But, you cry, at least it says what it’s for! I suppose so. But what exactly are you saying, and to whom? I am aware that child abuse is a problem. A big one. So are you, and you were before this nonsense. So was everyone else. You aren’t saying anything new. You aren’t really saying anything at all. And that’s a problem, because of what everyone is aware of. And what they aren’t.

Everyone is aware of the danger presented to children by talking to strangers. Everyone is aware that men shouldn’t be left alone with children (a friend of mine works at a daycare, and he was saying earlier tonight that a parent complained to his boss that he shouldn’t be allowed to be the only teacher in the room – this is not uncommon) and single men should be regarded with suspicion if there are children within a quarter mile (man, I’m not bitter at all). Everyone knows, on some level, that child abuse (particularly sexual abuse, where this attitude is not limited to children) is something that other people do – strangers.

Everyone is wrong. And that is what you should be raising awareness about.

Raise awareness about this. Raise awareness about the fact that almost all child abuse – sexual or otherwise (especially otherwise) – comes from someone the child knows, not strangers – regardless of what Dateline NBC might depict. That over 2/3 of sexual abuse (and I predict the number to be higher for other kinds) is perpetrated by a family member. Raise awareness that there are other kinds of abuse – physical, emotional, and neglect – and even though they don’t get the same amount of airtime they are no less important and far more prevalent. Especially emotional, in our society that so likes to portray emotional injury as weakness.

Raise awareness that we need to teach kids better. “Stranger danger” just doesn’t cut it, and we as a society do an immeasurable disservice to children by teaching them inherent distrust of new people. Teach children to tell friend from foe, not an ineffective shortcut that will interfere with social growth – kids have better judgment than most people give them credit for.

Raise awareness in children and adults alike (because the acquaintance statistic is not limited to children, nor is the marginalization of emotional injury) that friend and foe are not exclusive – there are lines that must not be crossed, no matter who’s doing it – and discomfort need not be tactile to be a legitimate grievance.

So go ahead, raise awareness. But know what you’re raising awareness about, and make sure it’s something worth it.

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A postscript: the twistedly amusing runoff: some people have posted pedobear (not safe for work page) as their profile picture and others (possibly prompted by that, more likely just being dicks for fun) have started a competing meme claiming that the whole cartoon profile picture thing was made up by a pedophile group to attract kids (which is almost definitely false). This particular brand of chaos is what /b/tards thrive on.

Oh, and on the off chance anybody reads this and wants to whinge about Rules 1 and 2: shove it. You aren’t clever and there hasn’t been a secret to keep for years. Get off my lawn comments.