Thursday, April 12, 2012

day of silence, or: the delicate art of shutting up

Today, at my school, it was the day of silence. Mostly it was a bunch of teenagers shutting up. Also not shutting up (but that's okay... they weren't on the list of people that were shutting up), and not shutting up even though their names were on the list. And inevitably, the people who weren't shutting up trying to get the people who were shutting up to stop shutting up.
We were doing it, they told us, because the voices of glbtq people are rarely heard.
This thing was pretty much orchestrated by the gsa (gay straight alliance). I mean, what the heck? I didn't even know we had a gsa! Do they hide themselves or something? And suddenly, this one day, shebang! Posters say "Day of Silence/ GSA" (no, that doesn't really make that much sense, but it had sparkles, so...).
Of course, there's the fear that people just did it for the ice cream.
But then, there's also the possibility that they did it because they care. And for most of the general population, getting teenagers to care about something is this huge deal. This huge, monumental, oh-my-god-you-all-get-ice-cream deal.
Thing is, we care.
You don't have to make us care with your ice cream. Or your pizza or whatever else you try to bribe us with. You don't have to make us care with snazzy stickers that have rainbows on them. You don't have to pretend that we deserve a job-well-done pat on the back, like we've been through ohsomuch.
Because the people we're fighting for have been through more.
But when we care, you have to let us care. You can't make us get a permission slip signed. You know how it is, don't you? Don't you understand that, for some people, home isn't where people agree with you?
If you want me to care so badly, you need to let me think for myself.
So, people. What do you think of this Day of Silence concept?

1 comment:

  1. I really liked this post.
    Well, I think that it's good that a GSA exists at your school and is trying to do anything at all. That's more than can be said for mine.
    But perhaps the way they orchestrated the event was not very good. The ice cream idea seems somewhat random and a bit ridiculous. But I think the organization is just trying to get people to go along with it. Sometimes it's hard to know how much respect or acceptance something like this will get from a bunch of teens.
    They want the kids to do care to feel as comfortable as they can, so they try to add extra sparkle to it.

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