At 9:27 PM,
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Star Drifter posted the following:
I'm limping again. It's the second time this month.
Age and hostility have caught up with me, and the whole deal has me thinking. I decided just before the start of the sixth grade that I was going to grow my hair. I had a terrible problem with my hair standing on end in the back, to the point that even the faculty in my elementary school mocked it. I figured, hey, it's the 80s. Guys do it all the time, and end up on MtV with half naked chicks all around them. Even better, I played drums. It was a terribly brilliant plan.
Or at least a terrible plan. Seventh and eigth grade in Wyandotte were middle school years. Ah, Wilson Middle School. Those fuckers spent a year straight calling me a faggot. Queer, butt-buddy. I heard all the popular ones of the day - at least the insults within the grasp of any semi-literate 13 year old who was educated by a child beater. A year later it elevated into some dillhole kicking my ankle out from under me in gym class. He then persistantly kicked at me while I walked a stretch which was probably over 100 yards to the school office. I got a shattered ankle. Not broken, but
shattered. Tiny, tiny little pieces of ankle where solid bone used to be. He got three days suspension. I got the memory of being called "fag" for a year, and he got
three days. I get a lifetime of swallowing pain relievers just so I can get to sleep. He got to be known as the guy who beat up the faggot.
Oh, I'm straight. It was just funny to call someone names. No one gets hurt, ya know.
And here's the deal. I'd
love for the producers of Will & Grace - more straight people profiting themselves from gay jokes - to send a little "thank you" letter. "Thank you for giving your ankle to
The Cause, so that we could sell commercials." At least then I'd feel like some good might have come of it. I'd love for GLAAD to find some cheap plastic trophie at a dollar store, write "Honorary Homosexual" on it with a permanent marker, and send the thing my way. I suffered before it was even a
hate crime to beat homosexuals up. Back then it got someone three days of suspension. This just isn't going to happen, however.
So what I want is a life of low
hostility. It's why I used to vent about people here - my not liking them doesn't mean I have to put them down in public. I'll just dig out a little corner for myelf and fill it with all my shit. Like a hamster's cage, but smellier. That failed. But I'm still going to vent.
I mean,
damn. I've been coming online since August of 1992. We can kick that back into the mid-80s if you count Q-Link on the Commadore. I'd say it counts as much as AOL, since it helped build the backbone. Anyway, it's been a
long time. I'm watching message boards become a place of nigh-constant
hostility. It seemed like there was a golden era, where we were working out the rules of this
global online community, and the first new wave of it decided that intolerance was the only intolerable trait, and
hostility was the only reason to be hostile. The next wave of them came in, though, and must have seen how we handled ourselves in the face of the intolerant and hostile, because they just started with being intolerant, hostile little punks to anyone in their sandbox, and demanded they get away with it.
It's late, and I'm in too much pain to sleep. All I want from it is a place where people stop acting like every offline wrong against them is a reason to act hostile against other people. "I've had a hard life," is common. Too bad. I've been raped, shot at, knifed at, beaten up by a teacher for trying to get the sun out of my eyes, had two different people try to run my car off the road and was all but hobbled. Life sucks. There's no need to take it out on others whether online or off.
There's no need to take it out on others whether online or off.
