“There aren’t enough houses to drop on the people who need houses dropped on them.”
Michael Yoder
Fag, femboy, sissy, four eyes… I heard them all and more. They were biting words that stung me deep to my core. I was bullied from grade three through grade twelve: nine years of daily harassment that left scars on my psyche and my soul. I was beaten up and chased; I had my ”gaunch” pulled in the locker room; I was turned on by “friends” who had to stop being my friends because I didn’t fit. I never understood the bullying. I was only me – there was nothing I was doing. I was simply different.
I think that we, as people living with HIV, understand being “different” in a way that helps us empathize with those who are bullied.
We don’t “fit”.
I worked for bullies and with bullies – men and women who battered others their own insecurities, but especially “subordinates”. We live in a society that values “strength” over “weakness” – winners are those people who climb to the top over the flailing bodies of those they have crushed beneath their Armani shoes. These are the Donald Trumps and Stephen Harpers of the world that insist on power and control as a means to an end – generally their own self-aggrandisement.
Pink shirt day is about a response to bullying, but I believe it must be more than that: one day each year does nothing much to address the wrongs that are committed in the school yard or workplace. When I was at the grocery store on Pink Shirt Day, I was encouraged by the number of workers proudly wearing pink – mostly women but a couple of men. I only hope that those people can carry the pinkness of the action into other areas of their lives.
When we collectively espouse a concept like non-bullying, we cannot leave it on the back burner once the hype and media attention has subsided. Like the early AIDS movement, we must bash at the stigma and rattle the cages of those who refuse to listen until the tiniest amount of sensibility seeps into their consciousness and things slowly change. And the change is sometimes imperceptible.
When I was a child and young man, bullying was more direct: there was no social media to use as a tool to denigrate the target. Now, I cannot imagine the level of psychological damage for a youth culture that lives almost exclusively online. Certainly there are still beatings and murders and names and words being used, but the advancement of technology has widened the playing field and made bullying even more abstract.
I wore pink on Pink Shirt Day. But I am pink on more than one day each year. I only hope that we can become a society where pink is just a colour and not a symbol for a lack common sense, and respect for the dignity of the person.
The Wicked Witch of the East was the unfortunate casualty of a tornado. An effective, albeit messy way to deal with a bully, but the metaphor is not lost on me. There have been many times I prayed that Dorothy Gale would drop a house on any number of people. But in the long run, I think that I have to change the way I interact with people – being openly gay and openly positive is a start.
Perhaps that’s the house I have to drop.