LOST YOUTH

In the last ten days, the news has been overwhelming, both with the senseless murder of a young man in a hoodie and the legal case involving a young man with a violin and a young man accused of tormenting that young violinist due to his sexual orientation, resulting in his suicide. A waste of our beautiful young people.

Young men will be young men. Where are WE to protect them as they learn? Where are we as a society when we allow them to be brutalized?

Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin wasn’t safe to go out for a bag of Skittles in his own neighborhood. Yes, George Zimmerman appears to be to blame for the actual death (as far as we can know from the news media versus actual evidence), and there are certainly questions about the speed of the investigation that followed. But what’s almost more disturbing is that Zimmerman was known to be a little too heavily into this vigilante mode, having many previous times called into the police about other “suspicious characters” he found on his self-appointed neighborhood patrols. Why wasn’t HE being watched? When Zimmerman called in with his report, he was told by the police NOT to follow Martin and not to take action—yet somehow he wasn’t charged or even investigated. Trayvon Martin was our son, our student, our future—left to the hands of some self-deputizing, gun-toting citizen—a bully, when you come right down to it. And nothing was done.

Over a year ago, a young gay musician at Rutgers named Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge, supposedly after being “outed” by his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who reportedly captured Tyler’s sexual encounters on his web cam and shared it with his friends. (The circumstances and what Rhavi did are now in question, despite the verdict—but more on that in a moment.) But the question is: what were the contributing factors? While Ravi’s drawing attention to Tyler’s private moments with an “older” man was no doubt one part of the equation, there are other things to be considered. Tyler had only recently come out to his parents, shortly before going off to Rutgers. No matter how wonderful his parents may be, there IS always a difficult period of adjustment when one proclaims oneself gay. It doesn’t make things better or worse, just different, and it takes time in a society where one’s sexuality apparently isn’t one’s own business. Add to that the actual “affair” that took place: a young gay man’s first tentative explorations can frequently lead one to an older partner who may be charming or have more experience but who may not be the best choice for a “relationship,” and in our first tentative searches, we look for Mr. Wonderful perhaps to help validate the realization of our sexual choice. Yet as with all searches for the right partner, it is less likely to happen right away and we make mistakes. The first mistakes hurt the most.