Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Girl They Hated, revisited: Why Amanda Todd?

            Tuesday, November 27, would have been Amanda Todd’s 16th birthday. A milestone for teenagers, she wanted a large party, so last Sunday, her mother decided to throw her one. It was streamed online, you can watch it here:


             
           Hundreds of people came. People who never knew her came. Celebrities came. The press, both broadcast and print, came. The trolls never came, but that shouldn’t surprise us: that would have required showing their faces.

            They’re still at it though on her Facebook memorial page. It’s impossible to look at now; hatred of that kind is painful to behold, even fatal in some instances. Even if there are ten well-wishers for every hater, even one hater can poison the well, and there are a lot more than one. Nor can they just be ignored; you can’t ignore shit on a gravestone.

            Her page (one of them) has evolved into a repository of inspirational quotations, presumably intended to make people feel better. Personally, I find them cloying, but I realize I’m not their intended audience. Maybe someone out there finds them useful.

            On either her multiple pages or the media discussion, there’s rarely any mention of depression or mental illness.  This is disapointing. The sufferers of chronic melancholy need a champion no less than the bullied*. They will have to wait. Bullying is the theme of the day, and it is against bullying that people will direct their energies. Very well. Maybe it will help. Maybe it will lead to an outbreak of well-meaning but ultimately useless government sponsored public awareness videos, which overlooks the fundamental issue of human capacity for cruelty, but it would be better than nothing. Maybe it will help.

            Maybe there will be a backlash. This cynical age of ours can only tolerate so much sincerity in so short a space of time. Public displays of grief and media saturation always produce a backlash from contrarians and cynics. And there are of course the trolls, who actually love Amanda, albiet for reasons that are twisted and sick. There are the legions of the self righteous who sneer at the suicidal. Most of all, there are the militantly indifferent, who will never forgive a girl for forcing them to take notice.


            A letter to Macleans in its November 12 issue summed it up. While acknowledging Amanda’s case was “entirely heartbreaking”, the writer went on to ask:
“ Why do we all have to focus on the tragic loss of one girl? Someone explain to us, so then maybe all the other families can understand why the deaths of their children don’t seem to be important enough for the world to know about.” 
The writer is more civilized than most who ask the question, but a sense of cynicism still prevades.  From the obnoxious technique of disguising a blanket statement as a question, to the assumption that concern for one victim implies indifference to all others, the writer is not concered about other victims so much as resentful that this one didn’t fade to obscurity like all the others.


            There lies the rub: Amanda had the unmitigated audacity to tell the world what was going on. She made us all take notice, and don’t they all just hate her for it!

            However they phrase it, and whatever they actually want to know, the question is the same: why Amanda Todd? The question deserves an answer, lest the cynics think there isn’t one.  
           
            To begin with, the deaths of all those other children are most definitely important enough for the world to know about. Whoever said that they weren’t? By all means, make them all famous, stick one on the cover of every newspaper every day and errect a national monument to them in Ottawa with their names inscribed in bronze. Absolutely. How the cynics would nash their teeth over that! If one victim achieving prominence should bother them so, imagine if every victim were commemorated thus.

            They haven’t been, because the public didn’t want to hear it. Bullying? Part of growing up! Get over it! Cyber-bullying? Turn off your computer! An online paedo cyber stalker aided and abetted by his victim’s peer group? Somebody else’s problem! I don’t want to hear!

            Well nobody can ignore it now. Amanda forced us to pay attention.

            Sometimes it takes a human face to make a statistic real. All those stories in the newspaper were only so many numbers on the page without a personal connection. How can one empathize with a number?

            Amanda wasn’t going to be another number. She told us exactly what those numbers meant, dragging us along on her journey into despair, one cue-card at a time.

           "Hello, my name's Amanda. I've decided to tell you my neverending story"
 
           One by one she details her experiences, a chronicle of humiliation, degradation and betrayal, underneath a bittersweet Jimmy Eats World song. It’s brutal to watch. One wants to look away, cover one’s eyes, pretend it’s just a music video or a Judith Thomson play. It isn’t. The girl holding those cue cards was real. She endured all this. And for her there would be no happy endings. She would go to her grave thinking the world had nothing better in store for her, and there was nothing to be done about it.

           It is a horrible feeling to be unable to help.

            I defy anyone to watch and feel unmoved. That a great many were unmoved, indifferent or even amused, is not surprising: people are vicious animals. What is surprising is how many people did respond with compassion and mercy. This I think is something worth celebrating.  

           
            A digression: when a child comes to you for help, wouldn’t you do what you could for them? Is it not natural to want to do something? Surely it’s the barest minimum requirement of being a decent human being. Amanda was asking for help; why should we surprised that so many people who heard her call wanted to respond? Isn’t that what empathy is? If they couldn’t help, why shouldn’t they be agrieved, and why shouldn’t this make its way into the news?


            What about all the others??! the naysayers ask. They always ask this when one of the multitudes actually gets noticed.  To them I ask: “If any one of those others came to you, would you not do what you could for them? And if there was nothing you could do, how would you feel? If one of them achieved prominence, would you chop them down as well?” I rather suspect that they would.  When they ask why Amanda got so much attention they’re really asking why she couldn’t stay politely anonymous. In other words, why couldn’t she just shut up? Indeed, “glory-hound” and “attention-seeker” are two things the trolls often accuse her of, as if it was wrong for her to bring attention to her plight.    
           
            Amanda didn’t shut up. She spoke out, people noticed, and now bullying is on the agenda. At the very least, maybe teenagers will be less trusting of online creeps now. That would be a result: we would have Amanda to thank for it.

            But sorrow needs no justification. If the public wants to mourn a dead girl it’s because the public can still feel something when a girl dies, and that not everyone has been numbed to the point of callousness by the vicious cackling of the blood-soaked media. If the majority of people can watch that video and feel some measure of compassion, that is a relief. If the outpouring of grief brings some measure of comfort to the girl’s family, why stem it? If it raises awareness of an important issue, then why not? And if the girl gains some measure of posthumous fame, then so-fucking-what? I for one won’t begrudge her that epilogue.  Let the girl have her party.
             

             Why the focus on Amanda Todd? Because she made the issue real in a way no textbook, after school special or public awareness video could. We spent a little time in her shoes and came away shaken, complacency shattered. We couldn’t ignore the victims  any longer, couldn’t pretend not hear those cries. Amanda forced us to pay attention.
           
            Amanda made us listen.   




* Indeed, Diane Weber Bedeman,  writing in the Toronto Star on October 18, argued that depression and mental illness were more important factors in this case than bullying. Bullying may have been the trigger, but not every victim of bullying kills themselves. Letter writers shot her down, and the issue hasn’t been raised again. It should be: depression is a spectacularly misunderstood topic. Depression is not the same thing as sadness. It isn’t even perpetual sadness.  It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain. It numbs the pleasure centres, and interferes with perception.  A depressed person does not see the same world as you or I; it is a different reality. Amanda would seem a textbook case: hundreds of people came to her memorial. She had two parents who loved her, friends who came to visit her, and a school that put measures in place to help her. But she still felt she had “no one”. That’s how it feels to be depressed. 
Her mother Carol has mentioned mental health many times, telling the
CBC that Amanda had tremendous social anxieties that kept her from leaving the house, that she “didn’t always understand the repercussions” of her actions, that “she just felt alone, and that’s part of the mental health issue”.  She told a Vancouver radio station of the disconnect between what Amanda knew logically and how she felt:

                We talked about how it would make her family and friends feel worse for a long,
                long time.  She understood that. But with mental health – something didn’t click.
                                                                                                      (Macleans, pg72,  Oct. 29, 2012)

By all means have the anti-bullying weeks and the pink shirt days, but pray don’t forget the dark place so many young people already find themselves in. No one who knows anything about depression would ever use “cowardice” or “laziness” in the same sentence. Society’s current stigma of suicide is just an extension of it’s stigma against mental illness, which amounts to a superstitious denial of science on par with creationism.

Links:
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Local+Shows/British+Columbia/ID/2304836436/
http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Canada/ID/2304836086  
Amanda Todd: The Girl They Hated (part I)

3 comments:

  1. Beautifully written Steve. Thanks for your thoughtful blog.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. I am so pleased you liked it. Thankyou very much for the kind feedback.

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