Re: 2012 Elections Part I: All Politics is Yokel
Do the names Reynard Johnson or Bill Sparkman ring a bell? Johnson was the teenager found hanged in his front yard in Kokomo, Mississippi in 2000. A death ruled suicide by local and state authorities and Janet Reno's justice department. That didn't stop Jesse Jackson from showing up, claiming the lad had been the victim of a lynching. After all, we had an election coming, and it was important to bolster black turnout.
Bill Sparkman was the part time census worker found hanged in Kentucky with "FED" written across his chest and his hands bound. The usual suspects proclaimed this a hate crime or an anti-government crime and launched into their shop warn talking points. The only trouble was Sparkman staged the event. He was sick with cancer (or thought he was) and had an excessive amount of insurance and wanted to leave something behind for his son, who was having money problems.
The only connection to the tragic school suicides we've been discussing is the attempt to politicize these cases by people who should know better, but don't care. I can't imagine anything worse than losing a child, except losing a child by his own hand. The parents will blame themselves for the rest of their lives. A wound that never heals. And it's almost universally true that parents are the last to know. Naturally they want to make some sense of what happened to their child, looking for "reasons" to explain the inexplicable.
"Bullying" has become the cause du jour in the case of gay kids who kill themselves. And while "bullying" these days is ugly and repulsive and far worse than decades ago, it remains to be seen whether it "causes" an otherwise stable child to end his life. And let's not forget gay kids aren't the only targets of bullies. Kids who are ugly, fat, poor, physically handicapped, etc. etc. can also be targets. Bullying shouldn't be permitted, it's as simple as that. But we should protect all of its targets, not just gay kids. It seems to me the gay rights crowd in that district is interested in more than just "tolerance" and "understanding." They want acceptance of their entire agenda, no questions asked, and these tragic suicides provide them with talking points and leverage.
If bullying caused these kids to kill themselves, shouldn't there be more gay kids committing suicide? Do gay kids commit suicide in districts that are more "progressive" on these matters? If a kid kills himself after he was turned down for a prom date or broke up with his girl friend, shouldn't we have many more teen suicides? Remember the case of the boy who killed himself, and his parents sued because a rock song "caused" him to do it? Shouldn't many more kids have died listening to the same song? Remember when some kids who played "Dungeons and Dragons" were killing themselves? Did the game "cause" those deaths?
I'm suggesting that two things are going on here: gross oversimplification of teen suicides. I mean, kids who are seeing a psychiatrist kill themselves all the time. And the doctors were unable to predict or prevent the deaths. The second, of course, is this effort to criminalize policy differences. It is irrational, not to mention exceptionally cruel, to suggest Michele Bachmann is "responsible" for this suicide cluster. I don't rule out that the "anti-gay" policies of the district may have played a role in the suicides and the bullying, too.
But that's different from absolutely, positively blaming the policies and the bullying and by extension Bachmann, because she's "responsible" for both.
My (admittedly limited) understanding is what brings teenagers to the point of attempting suicide is complex and subtle. And that while certain setbacks may trigger the behavior, there were other problems long before the setbacks. Klebold and Harris went to their prom on the Saturday night before they shot up Littleton HS. They were both homicidal and suicidal and nobody caught it. The well publicized cases of shool shootings generally involved kids who didn't show up on anybody's radar as being a threat. All I'm arguing is that we are dealing here with complex behavior with not easily determined "causes" and it's unfair (at a minimum) to blame it on a politician. Oh, and this blame game isn't likely to help identify and intervene with suicidal kids either.
