Control: Same Murders, Same Prejudice, Different Decade

I, Dalton Lewis, suffered from homophobia in middle school even though I wasn’t gay. At middle school people would whisper that I was gay to my friends. They would say that gay people wore a certain earring. They would call people gay when they wanted to insult someone. It started in elementary school — elementary school kids called me gay because I said that I didn’t care about a person. I remember the kids being terrified of being thought of as gay.

I remembered being confused and not knowing what words were offensive. I remember someone making fun of the special education kids and saying the same words until a friend of mine corrected me. Hey — I was just trying to be cool. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. People also hated Communism in that era. The Communists were seen as a problem and a threat to worldwide safety. Those Communists might blow us up, I thought. The Communists could destroy the world and were evil, we were told. I don’t know why we believed any of that prejudiced nonsense.

Today people have the same problem. A man shot up a nightclub full of LGBTQ people within the past few years. He killed about 50 people and injured 50 more. He was a known terror suspect and an Islam. The Islamic reps in America said: “The Muslim community joins our fellow Americans in repudiating anyone or any group that would claim to justify or excuse such an appalling act of violence.” Well said. No one knows why people hate people who are different than them. There is a theory of tribal culture that says that we were trained from thousands of years ago to fear and hate anyone outside of our own group. I suppose that’s probably true, but I don’t understand the hatred and fear that leads to this kind of mass murder. It seems incomprehensible to me that supervillains are real and superheroes aren’t real, but that’s the truth to everything. I don’t know why that’s the world we live in, but it is. I fear aliens showing up because people will hate and fear them and kill them and I don’t want that.

I remember when I was growing up a gay teen was murdered in a homophobic attack and no one could do anything about it. A few idiots in my high school tried to start the KKK and even invited an Asian member to the group. I don’t know what they thought they were doing, but they were clearly just idiots. They had a white person who apologized for his racism show up and speak about how bad hate groups were. I remember in college a white person tried to teach a class about African-American female novelists. Total unbelievable bullshit.

These days the racists aren’t idiots. They coordinate on the internet, spreading hate all around the web and gathering online to discuss their tactics and strategies. I have to block one or two racist or homophobic assholes in Starcraft 2 chats every year because someone says something racist or homophobic.

An upscale “Latin Saturday Party” was interrupted by the aforementioned shooter in 2016. People were shot and killed and were piled on top of one another, followed by a long standoff. I don’t know why people do these things. I hope that they aren’t mentally ill — we mentally ill people are seen as criminals and villains because of these incidents and because of crazy people in fiction killing countless innocents and poisoning the water supply and blowing up ferries. I just hope that people understand that most mentally ill people don’t hate people or kill countless innocents or work for people like the Joker.

Thanks, and take care, friends.