If you're "tired" of hearing about things that aren't geeky, you should probably skip this post. In fact you should probably just start skipping this blog altogether. We are who we are, and we aren't one-sided caricatures who only think and talk about certain things.
It just feels like things are on a downward slope here in the world, and it makes me sad. Bad things happened yesterday, and people of color were shown that they weren't important. It is weird that protests happened around the country, and yet the media decided to only cover the violence in Ferguson, as if that were the only thing happening.
This post is to archive some tweets that I made this morning, forgive the typo in one of them. I was typing on my phone. [Note: I added screenshots on November 6, 2022 just in case the Twitter problems cause my tweets to disappear. For now there are screenshots and tweets. If the tweets go away, I'll come back and edit again.]
If you think seeing reshares of the hateful things said online last night hurts, think about how the people they are directed at feel.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
We can't hide away and we can't pretend they aren't there.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
Some really horrible, terrible things were said last night by some hateful people online, and people like Wil Wheaton and Chris Kluwe were retweeting the things said to them by some of these people. Why, because we have to shine a spotlight on to this hate if we are ever going to make it go away. I have doubts about that sometimes, but it was even more disheartening that people were saying that they didn't want these things to be retweeted because they didn't want hate in their timelines.
We can't look away and we have to face these things. It is the only way that any sort of change will happen. It is easy to say that you don't want to see these things when they aren't directed at you, aren't part and parcel of your everyday life. But that doesn't take those things away, and that doesn't mean that we don't stare down these things in order to make a change in our world.
Then I tied it in with some geeky stuff, in a way, from my childhood, and a really good friend of mine from when I was growing up. His name was Marc Thomas, and in a lot of ways being his friend back then helped to make me into the adult that I am now. I don't often talk about these sorts of things because, well, mostly I think it isn't my job to justify who I am or where I have come from. All of us are on a journey through our lives, hopefully to get to a better place than where we used to be.
Something my mom told me recently hit home. When I was young, I made friends with the new kid in the neighborhood and his brothers.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
I didn't know that when we became friends his parents came to talk to my parents.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
His parents were worried there would be repercussions in a small Indiana town because of black kids playing with white kids.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
All I ever saw was another kid who liked comics and Star Wars.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
In fact, Marc introduced me to Matt Wagner, Grendel and indie comics. I still owe him for all of thatm
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
He died too young from illness, and I never really got to properly thank him.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
I'm glad that my parents talked his out of not letting us be friends. A lot of who I am came from that friendship.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
All right. I'm done for now.
— Christopher Helton (@dorkland) November 25, 2014
The thing is, that I guess that I'm not really done. Not by a long shot.
This stuff in Ferguson is just another piece of an enormous iceberg of hate that is trying so hard to break through the surface of the world. Just like GamerGate is another one.
We are at a crossroads culturally in our world right now. We are looking back into the past, at a world where casual and institutional hate of people because of the color of their skin, or their sexual preference, or their gender identity were a accepted as the norm. We are looking forward into a future where we can all treat each other as humans and not worry about labels or descriptors. We are seeing that there are a lot of people who are all of a sudden surprised that they are in the future, and that their hate is not okay. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They are angry at the world because they have been left behind. This is not the fault of the world.
We really should be better than this, but because we aren't we need to keep up the fight. We need to not casually mock people of color or gays or the transgendered or those with any of the multitude of disabilities. It isn't easy, and so many things are culturalized that it doesn't make it any easier. But it isn't supposed to be easy. Being better people isn't supposed to be an easy thing, but it is supposed to be the right thing.
So many of us were brought up on a steady stream of comics, science fiction, movies and other media where the moralities were clear cut. We should know better than this, and we need to stop being silent. When someone says something hateful about the LGBT we need to shout them down. Not because of our friends who are LGBT, who can fight their own fights, but because it is the right thing to do. The same when people say hateful things about people of color. The same when people say hateful things about the mentally or physically handicapped. Things aren't going to change until we let the world know that hate is unacceptable.
