Life's Like That

People seem to have a collective response of rejection of anything or anyone who is different. As though everyone needs someone to heap scorn upon, to make them feel superior. No curiosity evidenced about the differences whose understanding might make them far more emotionally malleable as decent human beings; just a sheer, outright condemnation. And not, for the most part, a cool, distant rejection.

Instead, one replete with condemnatory epithets with language especially devoted to connote precisely what it is about the differences that so offends them. Crude, hurtful language that once tossed into the air is meant to wound, and it does. No one enjoys being rejected, everyone wants to be liked and accepted. To be thrust aside as unworthy of friendship, as representing something found to be disgusting is a monumental insult to anyone's self-esteem.

Belittling phrases and descriptions meant to convey utter contempt are used like sharp arrows piercing the facade of nonchalant unconcern. While inside the heart crumbles in despair, at the outcast condition of the mind that occupies the body that has been described as that of a 'faggot'. That 'faggot', who felt he would be courageous and honest at the age of 15, admitting to the world at large that he was gay, was spiritually crushed.

The love of his family, his understanding friends and his faith were simply not enough to surmount his pain. He had made efforts to help himself and to help others in the same position he found himself in. He attempted to install a 'rainbow' group in his high school. He put up advertising posters, and they were summarily torn apart. He was hounded and he was mercilessly rejected.

And in the end James Hubley decided he could no longer bear the frustration and agony of being a gay teen. At age 15 he felt he had enough authority over his life to decide he would no longer occupy it. His father Allan Hubley describes his son as a compassionate person, always looking to help others, without a mean bone in his body. Which made him a good and decent being, but an extremely vulnerable one.

Like most young people he was looking for a special friend. Anxiously he looked for that friend who would value him, cherish him, want to always be with him, share his life with him. That friend did not materialize. Leaving him in despair that he ever would appear, to alter his life, make it more manageable, worthwhile, precious to him.

Suicide among young people is a problem; among gay teens an even greater problem.

But then, that collective mean streak so common in the society of the young strikes out at anyone who is different. Anyone who has values differing from those of the collective. Anyone who expresses opinions that diverge from the group's agreed-upon, and unspoken position. Sensitive, intelligent, gifted young people are shunned and disparaged by their peers for exhibiting just those attributes.

And the quite sad thing is that these attitudes do not occur out of nowhere. They are inherited, patterned after the values and the thought-processes and the spoken rejection of those upon whom the young pattern themselves; their parents.

And society is beggared by this prevailing attitude.