The Artistic Response to Group Hatreds

Hello Fellow Seekers of Light and Truth,

Well, I've found yet another thing that pisses me off. I'm gonna have to add one more thing to this list. I know that I can't focus too much on anger, and that I've got to be positive. I know this, I understand this. However, I cannot sit idly by while wrong is done. This time, said wrong is especially insidious and horrible, because it is packaged as "truth," and "virtue," and "religious freedom," and "family values," and then taught to children as gospel truth. Here, the children who are victims become the villains.



You might have come across this video. It comes from Greensburg, Indiana, from a church called the Apostilic Truth Tabernacle. The sickest part of this video is the orgy of applause that the adults, and how they egg the kid on after he is done gleefully exclaiming that 10% of the population deserves to DIE and GO TO HELL. This is the kind of vile public attack on a group usually reserved for Taliban country, or some hideous fascist regime from the 30's, where the Jew was the predator that was corrupting  our fatherland. And don't try to argue on this point because, Oh, they're not calling for anyone to be killed, or They don't hate anybody, they just don't want their kids to think it's okay.

First of all, even if this group hasn't called for anybody to be killed, others have called for it. Listen to Pastor Curtis Knapp from Seneca, Kansas's New Hope Baptist Church.



What sickens me the most is that these men bully, berate, and demonize an entire population, and then they run and hide behind God and Scripture. They don't even have the courage of their convictions to own their hatred and prejudice. While seeing the child's glee is sickening, it is ultimately the adults who are the most at fault. It is the preacher for denying his own insecurity, and flawed nature, by condemning innocent human beings to death, damnation and public contempt just because of who they are driven to love and marry.


This is another truly disturbing video, shown on Saudi TV. If you'll notice, the 3-year-old girl is spouting the same ideas about Jews' alleged guilt as have been used through the millenia to rationalize pogroms, barbarian attacks, and ultimately the Holocaust. This hateful ideology, once again, sung sweetly into the innocent ears of a child, makes me feel nothing but rage. Rage because I know where this leads. This leads directly to genocide, it happened in Germany, it happened in Kosovo, it's happened without much notice in many other places.

I have to be honest, as I watch this kid sing, and as I see the adults riotously applaud, there's an animalistic part of my brain that wants to go, and punch and kick everybody in that audience. The only thing that sickens me even worse than seeing a person hurt, is seeing injustice, cheered and affirmed as righteousness. I used to have a big problem with anger, and sometimes I still get overwhelmed by it. I would only hit another kid in anger, hard as I could, then I would feel really bad for him when I saw him in pain.

There is something visceral about the anger I have when people cheer the beating and attacking of the helpless, the innocent, the righteous. This is just as much violence against a people as going and lynching them. Remember Tyler Clementi, two years ago? He was the Rutgers Student who was outed having a gay affair by his roommate, and then killed himself because he was embarrassed by his peers. They gave the roommate a joke, slap-on-the-hand sentence. Here, the humiliation, the damage, and the no doubt the permanent demonization in the minds of some of his classmates is the key component of the violence done to him, that destroyed him to the point where he felt only death would save him. As far as I'm concerned, if you cause that to happen to a person, you are directly responsible for his death.

I might have told you this, but I first read the book 1984 when I was 15 years old. It was a dark, confusing time in my life. I deeply identified with the struggle against a great tyrannical order. What was even more terrible about this, was that they had the people in their minds and hearts, the people who would surely know this was not just, fully believed that it was the only justice. Even the protagonist was defeated in his own mind and disowned himself, giving himself over to the lie. For a while, because of this, I lost faith in humanity. If we could be conned and taught to embrace such evil, what hope was there? We are all guilty, no matter what our nationality, religion, or societal structure.
Later, I began to learn about Eastern spiritual principles. What has stuck with me about these is that they de-emphasize the doctrine of it, and are more in tune with the flow of life itself. I later came to realize that it was the doctrinal, rhetorical emphasis that lay at the roots of this collective sin, at the risk of getting religious here. When I reviewed literature on Orwell's life and work, five years later, for a review of literature I was doing for Comm. Studies, I realized that what he was attacking was the lock-step behavior of people when they gather in groups.

Groupthink is a term that's come to be used often because of Orwell's work. I've come to use it often myself. Here, we need to ponder a lot about what it means, because I believe it holds some answers. What it means is when people get into groups, their collective behavior and thought process tends to focus on the group's preservation, rather than individual well-being or ethics. In other words, it becomes about how do we win rather than how do we care for each other, and what is the best for everyone. 1984 was an extreme example of this, but the disturbing thing is, all societies embrace this groupthink to some extent.

Think about why the parents gleefully taught this kid to desparage "the homos." It was because, at this church, the doctrine says that gays are evil. That's what the Minister preaches. It is similar to the "two minutes hate," shown in 1984, in that it trains the churchgoers to hate them as the sinners from whom all of the world's problems originate. Then they are trained to praise a "hero" who destroys the "villain," in this case, the child who is taught that when he damns people with his words, he will be rewarded, affirmed. Let's not be ambiguous here: this is violence. This is the reason so many gay, lesbian and transgender kids are killing themselves. This social torture makes them feel so rotten about themselves. When you are told you are worthless, dirty, and evil over and over again, you begin to feel dead inside, to internalize the pain.



So why would I be talking about all of this on an arts blog? Over and over, I have thought about what I would say to the question "Why do you get so political on an arts blog?" Well, as I have alluded to, I used to be much more overtly political and ideological. In fact, not long ago, I thought about getting into politics myself. I was always tense, on edge back then. I would spend hours arguing with points of view in my mind. This made life less enjoyable and more tense and argumentative. Long story short, I realized that there was something about the human experience that I saw, that demanded more than just political activism and struggle. In the last few years, the times when I have learned the most about how to heal people, is when I have explored life without judgement, with a creative eye.

The above video is from a year and a half ago. Joel Burns, a Gay City Councilman from Fort Worth, Texas, decided to give this speech after a rash of young gay kids commiting suicide, just to assure them that they were not alone. Listen to it, please. I couldn't listen to it without tears welling up. It's just a human reaction, I think. This crystallizes what my approach to issue-tackling has been over the last two years. It has to do with working from the experience we have in common, rather than the doctrines that make some good and others evil. Here, kids learn, again, from groupthink strategies, that the only way they can be accepted is for them to either ostracize, humiliate, or physically destroy some kid just because he looks different.

What this blog is about is the experience of life. The heartbreak, the love, the pain, the violence, the redemption. That is why I am talking about groupthink now. It inhibits us from owning our own life experience. We feel like we have to sell ourselves to feel liked, secure, complete. We can't claim our own experience, instead, we are subconsciously taught to hate ourselves in a variety of ways. You know, one thing I was shocked to learn is that when you watch an ad, 90% of what you take in is on a subcoscious level.

This process of melding our groupthink through ads, TV shows, movies, even stories we tell each other, does intense damage to people who are attracted to the "wrong" sex, but I believe it is not just limited to gays. Like I said, I have always loved girls, but what I find distressing is that, when boys get interested in girls, there is a certain unwritten script they expect you both to follow. The girl is expected to be the needy, emotional one who needs protection, and the boy must be confident, able to throw down at all times to protect her, and absent, except for sex. I realized early on that the script wasn't going to work for me. I came to want romance with girls, but something has always bugged me about the blind obedience people have to this way, and the condemnation you face if you ever stray from it.

I could give endless examples. The point is, groupthink kills our potential as human beings. What we need is to find our own way, and find attachments to people and groups that differentiate, in other words, they set boundaries so that we can stay free from the echo chamber that produces prejudices and hatreds against outsiders. We must learn to do this so that our children learn that NO group is sinful or evil by nature of is being different. In order that our children grow up to realize their full potential to live with others, and not claim the contempts of their parents as God's will, remember what I mentioned in the Bully post, the guy who said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Undoubtedly, some will interpret this to mean that God is without sin, and therefore, God is expressing his hatred of these groups through Christians' discrimination. To me, it means that none of us has the authority to universally condemn another group as intrinsically evil, for the same sins they possess also exist in us. We all have potential to bad, but we are not defined as creatures of sin. That's the main qualm I have with Christianity; all it seems to see is our bad. We need not be defined by our baser tribal instincts, though.

Well, I'll leave it at that for now. Undoubtedly, I'll talk more about this at a future date. I saw this, and as I said I got so angry about it that I decided to convert my angry energy into creative work. It is the same principle I used in my post on Newt Gingrich. So, anyway, I'll have some more good material for you soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

"Bully" Response: Tear Down These Walls!

Hi Fellow Seekers of Life and Truth,

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging for a while. This semester has proved to be much more hectic than I expected. But the strange thing is, I don't mind as much. It's a good kind of hectic. There are good kinds of hectic, and there are bad kinds. So I've been going to classes, volunteering for more things than I have time for, which is okay, because most of those things have not been given to me. Anyway, I'm back because I've got something important to talk about.

This film, the documentary Bully, came out a few weeks ago, and I thought it would be cool to see, but, as with most of these films, it was only playing at a few theaters in New York and LA, not here in Long Beach. Lo and behold, yesterday I discovered it was at a small theater here in town, so last night I went and saw it. It isn't an easy movie to see. Seeing it, I certainly thought back to lots of times when I had experienced abuse in school.

I remember one morning when I was in the first or second grade, in the late 90's. One boy turned to me and just said "Tony, you're a faggot." That was it. Pretty straightforward. No follow-up, nothing leading up to that, he just called me a faggot and that was it. I thought, "Huh, what's that all about?" I had heard that word someplace before, but I had no idea what it meant, or, more importantly, what it conveyed.

In the following years, I grew into an environment where statements like this were among the nice things that happened to you. Statements like "Have you seen the movie (whispering inaudibly) Gay People Say What?" (Calling toward you) "Hey, gay guy!" "Shut up, you're a fucking retard!" were a common thing.

Poster from a campaign against the phrase "That's so gay!"

I focused on gay slurs here because those were the ones that were used as invective weapons. I think those were especially damning among us boys, although I have only my male experience as a frame of reference for that. The two biggest lines of attack were gay slurs and slurs against mentally challenged kids. This was a mystery to me, because I had always been straight. There was never really any doubt that I was going to grow up to love girls, even though I had issues dealing with them. But, for some reason, I got more of the gay slurs than most of the other kids.

It seems like the kids most vulnerable to bullying are the ones who cannot or will not live up to their gender's expectations. For instance, one of the people shown in the film is a teenage lesbian who lived the "butch" role. She lived in a little town in Oklahoma someplace, so of course, upon coming out, she was radioactive. Former friends of the family refused to even talk to, or look at, them. So, if you're a girl who doesn't act and think the way a girl "should" you will be shunned and a social pariah, and if you're a boy who doesn't behave the way a boy "should," you will be intimidated, berated, and physically attacked.

The worst thing is that the adults in the film were dragging their feet to help, and often were not helping. The adults' attitudes and answers often implied, even if unintentionally, that the victims were to blame. They talk as if "kids will be kids," "boys will be boys," "kids are cruel, that's just how it is," implying that it is the kid's responsibility to fit in, to be accepted, and to be like the other kids. The flip side of this is that kids who cannot or will not "fit in" have it coming if they get attacked.

I certainly got messages like this when I was growing up. My parents would tell me things like "The kid who stands out, that's the kid that gets picked on," "You hide in a corner, and when someone picks on you, you go "poor me." Do you want us to pinch every penny and send you to private school?" I'm not blaming only my parents for this, because I love them. The sad irony is that this kind of victim blame usually happens when the event is so awful and that people are so horrified by it. This ranges from treasured young ones being bullied, to women being raped, even when the poor are shafted by a bad economy. Below is a video of presidential candidate Herman Cain discrediting Occupy Wall Street protesters last Fall, and telling the poor to "blame themselves" if they are in a bad place.



What all of this goes to show us is that we have a way of refusing to believe it could be this bad, by internalizing these absurd justifications offered by authorities, and sometimes the aggressors themselves. Most of us internalize these beliefs offered about this. I have internalized many of these things said about me. The worst part of all of this is that if someone can't stand up for themselves, they deserve what they get.

When you internalize these beliefs people throw at you, the terrible things they can do to you start to seem normal. You know, I've learned that about 90% of the way ads, TV and media work is at a subconscious level. You soak up so many things up without even realizing it. This is particularly true of children and teenagers, even in your 20's, this is still going on. Books, movies and so forth tell us that the only way that works to respond to bullies is to retaliate physically. However, this can have bad consequences.

One of the girls in the movie kept getting attacked by the other kids, so one day, she took her mother's gun onto the school bus. She threatened the other kids, but was subdued, arrested. Thank God no one got hurt or killed on that bus. But the sheriff's department held here on, as they determined, "45 felony charges" (this was in Mississippi) and would have faced more than a lifetime in prison.

They decided to have her see a mental counselor instead, but the message was still clear; she would take all the blame, and the kids who were doing that to her would be let off the hook. In this way, she was made to look like the crazy one. We don't know what those kids were doing to her. It could have been something truly terrible, something against which anyone would react strongly. When you've been horribly abused, is it insane to do something to stop it?

That said, I do not believe that anything you do to so-called bullies is okay. There are right and wrong ways to stand up for yourself. I never liked seeing people get hurt, that's why I had a problem dealing with people picking on me. I could never respond decisively, in the way that make bullies back off. However, there were a few times when I "lost my shit" so to speak. This leads to my next point about the movie. The movie focused mainly on a few episodes, around the country, where bullying tactics had led to kids snapping. It had little to do with things we can do about it, which is okay, because there, you get into harsh political territory, but I will throw out some considerations here.

In the last 12 or 13 years, since the Columbine Massacre, bullying in schools has become a political issue of heightened importance. Seeing people abused is a very personal issue for most people, because most people have been abused at some point themselves, but what can we do about it, as a society and as individuals? Well, first we need to look at our educational priorities. We must realize that when you're young, class is not the only place you are learning. You are also learning how to deal with people, how to relate, people are hopefully teaching you good morals.

We have to transcend this public school/private school debate. We have become attached to this one mode of public school that isn't working, or, alternatively, a charter/private school model where everyone has to be "effective" enough, or they will be cut. Life does not improve when everything is run like a corporation. However, our public school model clearly needs to be updated from the gigantic, impersonal model public schools have followed since World War II.

Here's the choice we've got: we could try to beat the Chinese and the South Koreans at their own game. In each State of the Union, Obama has held them up as the ones we have to beat. Sure, we could focus all on our test scores and grades, but we'd lose a lot of our innovative human potential. Here's the other choice: we could take a look at what the Finnish have done with their education system. Below is a report from The Young Turks about the steps Finland has taken in the last 30 years.



Now, I'm not saying we should do everything that the Finns have done, but their approach does touch on some of the concepts I've been ranting and raving about here for months. In the context of countering an environment of bullying, this is even more crucial to our success, and since a few of the kids featured were driven to end their lives, the stakes can be life or death. Now, you might ask, What does education policy have to do with bullying?

Well, a lot, as it turns out. The film showed school administrators insisting they would do all that they could, but then not doing much at all, besides offering words. In one instance, the principal even reproached the victim when both of them were caught in a scuffle. This shows that our school system must be a part of this change.

I remember, when I was back in school, I had to take speech classes because I was not skilled at communicating with the other kids. I don't think it's crazy to suggest that classes on communicating issues, complaints, wants or fears to other kids could be part of a curriculum all young students experience. As it stands, there isn't any standard course in school available on this until you get to college. That's why I decided to major in communication studies, because I believe that if we were able to work through our differences, a lot less pain would be in this world.

So some ideas that come to my mind are having some regular programs in place on conflict resolution, assertiveness, confidence, and responsibility for your own actions. This last one is critical, because it would be easy to assume, "Oh, it doesn't happen to me," even if you are yourself a part of the process. One of the kids in the movie recalled that when he was in second grade, he would join in the teasing and ridicule of the outsiders, but then in the third grade, he took resposibility for his wrongdoings, and that year, he decided he didn't need popularity anymore.

Even though I have been the victim of verbal attacks, I used to join in on jeers, pleasing myself with my inventive use of terms for "gay." I'll just say that now. I've said, thought, and done plenty of things I wish that I hadn't, that I would never do again. I have held racist, sexist and homophobic assumptions. Kids need to learn to accept those insecure tendencies we all have, to explore them without judgement, and take ownership of their insecurity, before the insecurity takes ownership of them.

This leads neatly into the personal goals. There is only so much the Departments of Education can do at a state and national level, or that school administrators can do. Ultimately, it is up to the child, with assists from their parents, to stand on their own two feet. The group of children must learn that being different is not bad. It is not good either, but it is not a sin. People are neither good nor bad, but rather, they are there. If children learned this from their parents' examples, think of how their growth would change. They would get the confidence to stand up for parts of them that aren't the "cool" things.

Now, all of the episodes in this movies happened in Bible Belt Red States, states like Georgia, Oklahoma, Iowa and Mississippi. I found out where these places are located, and all of them, with the exception of Sioux City, Iowa, are remote, rural towns. I guess that makes the bullying even more prevalent, when the town is so close-knit, everybody knows everybody, and outsider types are not welcome. In any area, it definitely is not seen as "cool" to be different. When everybody is faced with insecurity, the "different" ones are made the scapegoats. This is a very easy, human, and common pattern, but it is also very dangerous. When it happens to a society, the consequences can be deadly.

The bad news is that the scapegoat process of school bullying has gotten more dangerous and dire. With technology and the easy availability of weapons to anyone, the actions can be far more damaging. The good news is, the vicious cycle can be broken. When enough people rise up, and refuse to go through the motions of life, the school climate will begin to shift. People can set boundaries for themselves, bottom lines, refusing to do "whatever" to be cool and fit in. But that takes confidence, which a lot of kids don't have. Only bullies themselves generate it by hiding their problems and shame under their aggression.

So we need to set new criteria for what people confident in themselves do. Being confident comes from knowing that you are good enough. People who feel like they are good enough do not have to use others, berate them or physically destroy them, or destroy them inside. People who are good enough can learn from their past faults. The reason I mentioned the "Bible Belt" earlier is because this is a big thing among Christianity. Didn't some guy once say "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?"

Remember who Jesus spent all his time with? The crippled people, the homeless, the hookers, the lepers. Think of all the most disowned and disliked kids, the gay and lesbian teenagers, the transgender teenagers, the ones with learning challenges, the disabled ones, and the vast array of kids who feel like they can't talk to anybody. Nobody would listen to them. Nobody would care about what they like, who they are, their struggles, their state of being. If this sounds like I'm describing part of my life, it's because I am. I know that I'm not the only one this applies to, though.

Part of this may be a selfish thing, because I often became one of the abuse scapegoats. I think the worst thing in the movie, and the closest to home, was when they told the kid with the odd face issue, "Two to a seat, dumbass!" on the bus. That is the essence of what most bullying is; when someone makes a mistake, they destroy you, and most other kids never really give you a second chance after that.

I used to make all sorts of social gaffes, bear the ridicule, then internalize the shame about myself. But I am older now, and I know that I can get second chances if I do screw up. The final sequence in the film involves parents, children and teenagers holding rallies in their cities and states to bring awareness to this issue. One man, who had lost his son to suicide, implored to the crowd: "Reach out to that one new kid who has no one." The paradox is this: we need to be there with those kids for them to stand on their own. Because we have all been vulnerable, without anyone, at some time in our lives.

It's about time we did the non-normal thing and took a stand for someone outside, because once a critical mass of people does this, bullies will no longer be able to hide their own shame and insecurity behind beating up the helpless people, and they will have no followers to intimidate them. Then, we will all have to face our own insecurity and vulnerability, as the best human beings do. The solution to bullying is, ultimately, not to outlaw words or actions, it is to reclaim all of our humanity.

Please post a comment below, if you have any feelings, stories, or ideas about this issue. If you have been bullied, or someone you care for has experience with bullying, share whatever you feel comfortable with. The point is to show that more and more people have suffered, that you are not alone, that you don't have to "just get over it," and people will listen to you openly and nonjudgementally. I apologize for the sheer mass of this post, but I have had these feelings for a long time, and I have just recently gotten the words to express them. Thanks for listening, and please go see the movie Bully whenever you get the chance. I will have more interesting good stuff for ya in the next post.

See ya!