Does it really get better?

I will concede that the It Gets Better campaign has garnered a lot of sympathy for the plight of LGBT teens and mainstreamed awareness of the social ill that is the suicide of LGBT youth. Judging it by those parameters, it is a fantastic campaign. It went global, it was all the rage and political leaders, and other VIPs recorded their own It Gets Better YouTube couture.

Reminiscent of the NOH8 campaign it was about visibility and popular appeal. It somehow made an extremely emotive issue a rallying point. It was easy to paint any detractors of equality as simply callous (which they are in any case, one need not parade human suffering to get that point across).

Sure, being LGB and T gets more tolerable as one ages, but tolerance is far from "better". Acceptance is also a word thrown around. Acceptance is nice, won't deny, but it's not enough.

Methinks in our attempt at mainstreaming we might have settled for second best. Tolerance and acceptance aren’t issues we have to work on (from a progressive perspective), these are things that should be the bare minimum.

Sure, it gets better, but is “better” enough? Moreover, by whose standards would we measure this hypothetical “better”? Tolerable is also better than intolerable but I bet you won’t settle for that.

Are suicides in our community so rife and such a social ill that we need to present any form of positivity and encouragement no matter how lacklustre it might be to those radical activists?

I thought a lot about this topic, wrote, and erased, a close friend even suggested that I do the right thing and self-censor, and not publish the most morbid parts. I was awfully melancholy I must admit, but like the weather that changes too. Maybe this change gives us some fragment of hope.

We somehow know from experience that we are not our inflictions and that they are evanescing. I have dealt with the concept of suicide to an extreme extent. I have seen the undiluted desperation that chafes chronically. I suspect the intervention is about as desperate as the inflicted.

So, yes, we tell people that it gets better, because in a sense that is true. One’s circumstances change over time. One’s mood changes over time and so the impetus for execution is temporary but the execution has long-term consequences.

Before you make that final decision, stop and think, and if you cannot think contact someone, anyone. Speak or interact with someone, they will most probably not tell you cheesy lines but it will divert your attention.

Bertrand Russell must have been in a flippant mood, who knows, but he said one important thing that speaks to this topic too: “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”

Think about that.