Love thy neighbor. Unless, of course, they're different, and then you can hound them until they commit suicide.
According to Tempest's journal, found under her bed after the suicide, her classmates often crowded around her chanting "Jesus loves you," along with other comments that ridiculed her Wiccan beliefs.
It would be nice if there was some sort of easy answer. Something that would magically make people understand the whole "live and let live" concept. You can institute sensitivity training, of course -- and hey! it's even been shown to work -- but I'm sure that the parents of these lovely children would object to them being taught such things. And, after all, these lovely children had to have gotten their attitudes from somewhere, didn't they? Somewhere they had to learn that it was all right to go after people like that, and then the lesson was reinforced by the teachers and administrators who knew and did nothing.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!