Google “Tyler Clementi.” I got 282,000 results for the Rutgers University student who committed suicide after one of his schoolmates subjected him to a cruel, despicable prank. Clementi was a freshman, apparently gay, and had sex with another male student in his room.
Clementi’s roommate may have grown up watching too many Jerry Springer and Maury Povich shows. The roommate, Darun Ravi, thought he’d get some yuks by streaming a video of Clementi in the act with another dude on the Internet. Clementi was so despondent by the invasion of his privacy that he took a leap off the George Washington Bridge.
Police hadn’t even recovered Clementi’s body before there was a movement afoot to stamp out the “epidemic” of bullying and its offspring, “cyberbullying.” We media types couldn’t give you enough about Clementi and the crisis of bullying, especially anti-gay bullying.
Less than a year later, the president of the United States considered bullying such a grave matter that he recently held a White House Conference to Prevent Bullying.
Now Google “Carnell Dawson.” I got 1,510 results, less than 1 percent of the figure for Clementi. Google the name “Quartrina Johnson” and you’ll get a paltry 413 results.
Whatever else you can say about Clementi’s tragic and unfortunate death, at least he had a choice in the matter. Quartrina Johnson didn’t have that. Carnell Dawson didn’t either. Nor did his wife, Angela Dawson. Their five children didn’t have a say in their deaths.
The deaths of those eight people cause scarcely a ripple of concern among members of the media, the general American population or most elected officials. But the suicide of one young gay man sends us into overdrive.
What led to the deaths of Johnson and the Dawson family is an even bigger crisis than bullying or cyberbullying, but don’t expect most of us in the media to catch on to that soon. And Obama? He’s useless on this one.
It’s called the “stop snitching” mind-set. It has led to the deaths, intimidation and harassment of more people than bullying and cyberbullying ever have, but the victims aren’t the ones favored by the PC crowd.
Most of them aren’t gay, and are of no use for those who love to use anti-gay acts to promote their own political agenda. In fact, most victims of those who cling to the “stop snitching” mind-set are common, law-abiding citizens, which means they’re sure as hell of no use to Obama and other Democrats.
Obama should have held a White House Conference to Stamp Out the Stop-Snitching Mentality, but that would have put him at odds with one of his party’s core constituencies: felons. That’s neither a cheap shot nor a straw man argument. It is the Democrats who’ve consistently whined about the “disenfranchisement” of felons.
Instead of making spurious claims about how bullying adversely affects the academic achievement of students, Obama could have told Americans about Johnson, who was only 15 when she was strangled.
A man charged with the statutory rape of her 13-year-old foster sister was the mastermind behind the crime, which was committed to prevent Quartrina from “snitching.”
Obama could have told Americans about how a drug dealer set fire to the Dawson house, killing seven people because Carnell and Angela Dawson were considered “snitches” for calling police about drug dealing in the neighborhood. And he could have linked the anti-snitching mentality to bullying: Students are bullied in school because their schoolmates don’t want to “snitch” on the bullies.
Instead, all we got from Obama was his continued pandering to America’s victimhood lobby.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
