12-13-2013, 08:38 PM
Now, this is going to definitely be something odd, coming from me. I'm not necessarily known for being too serious of a person OOC, with a lot of my own OOC posts containing some degree of light heartedness and sarcasm. This won't be the case, I'm going to be completely honest for this post, because this is a serious issue I've noticed not only on the internet, but it is especially prevalent in the realms of cyberspace.
Fuck suicide glamorization. No, not the douchebags who tell people to kill themselves over the internet because they're fucking cowards. I mean, the people who make suicide look like this big thing, and fuel this morbid fascination with death in mainstream thought.
Story time:
A couple years ago, I moved from the town that I lived in all my life to another one three hours away. I walked in the first day a stranger in a strange world. Yadda yadda, moving on. Fastforward to some point further down the road, and something legitimately tragic happens.
Over the course of one weekend, two students in my school district (one in the grade above mine, the other two grades above me) take their own lives. One of which being the son of my school's principal. I don't feel as though I need to explain just how fucking terrible that is. I didn't know either one of them, and despite my already cynical worldview, the combined somberness of teachers and students alike almost drove me to tears. No family should have to go through that.
Now, suicide itself isn't what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the suicide culture so to speak.
About a week or two after their deaths, a T shirt was developed and sold on school grounds in honor of the one in the grade above mine (as the one two grades up wasn't in the same school as us), and they were planning on planting a tree in his honor as well.
A lot of people in my own grade (among them were way too many people who I'm sure never spoke to him once in their entire lives) bought the shirts and wore them often, some still wear them to this day, two years later.
That's where the problem comes in. I doubt the intentions of a lot of people who purchased the shirts, because when something becomes a new trend, everyone tries to fit in.
Suicide and honoring the dead should never be a trend. However, this is all a tangent and isn't my planed message.
My message is the fact that the shirts exist, that the tree was to be planted. Should suicide really be honored? All it does is create a culture where "commit suicide, and you'll get fifteen minutes of fame!"
Case and point, Amanda Todd. Y'know, the girl that drank bleach? You wouldn't, had she not done that. Had she not killed herself. Yet, it was reported all over the internet, and people who didn't know who she was five minutes before were liking facebook pages and reblogging shit on tumblr about how tragic this all was. Not while this shit was happening, not while there was another way.
Such is the way of life, as I've seen in the short amount of time that I've been alive. Everyone's so content to say "this never should've happened" but no one offers to make it that way.
Instead of honoring those who do it like they were martyrs or something (not saying this has happened outright), what we all need to do as a society is admonish the causes. Chief one in teens being that little word everyone's so content to say shouldn't happen, but is too scared to actually stop.
Bullying.
Bullying and suicide go hand in hand.
That's the real problem. Not the individual stories of those victims. By promoting the individuals, by giving their life stories out five hundred thousand times on TV, gives other people in similar situations ideas that maybe, just maybe, their stories will be told if they follow in that person on the news' footsteps.
The stories of those victims do deserve to be told, but it should always be noted that they're victims, and that there's something that can be done about it. Being stricter on punishments and surveillance when it comes to picking up on the behavior, talking about the act of bullying and how much a repugnant fucking asshole the bullies are, that's what's going to get somewhere.
Teenagers as a whole are fucking cowards. Put the pressure on them, and they'll fold like the spineless fucks that they are.
Another local story; this twelve or thirteen year old girl gets bullied to the point of committing suicide by jumping off a building. The two main bullies were arrested and charged with aggravated stalking. Not as strict as I would've liked, but it's a start.
Then, there are the people who post things on their social networking profiles about how if they were to kill themselves, that the world would go on without them. These type of suicide glamorizors are the type of people I have a major problem with. Fuck them. The world loses enough people every day, you don't need to be another drop in that proverbial bucket. You're alive now, and you have been for however many years. If you somehow weren't meant for this world, you wouldn't have been the sperm that fertilized the egg.
Life is precious, so to see people waste it always pisses me off.
I think I'm just starting to ramble on and on now, so I'll end this. I might also be coming across as a tad contradictory at some points, as I really just kinda vented on this topic.
Just really needed to say all this.
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