Bridge of Sighs

We used to drive over the George Washington Memorial Bridge on our way to Lynn’s mom’s house in Rhode Island, but the traffic always was awful, and the gritty urban vistas in no way compensated for the pace. That’s why we were zipping across the nearby Tappan Zee Bridge in the New York City suburbs on September 22 while, that same day, things were turning uglier than usual over on the GW.

Having posted a Facebook status update that read, simply, “jumping off gw bridge sorry,” 18-year-old Tyler Clementi proceeded to do just that. His roommate had posted on the Internet video of Clementi engaged in sexual activity with another man. The Rutgers University freshman’s reaction had gone well beyond mortification, all the way to suicide.

As coincidence would have it, authorities retrieved Clementi’s body from the Hudson River on September 29, the same day we re-crossed the Tappan Zee on our way home. By that evening, news of the death and the circumstances surrounding it were all over the digital and old-school media.

The story stirred a variety of thoughts and emotions in me. Most viscerally, I felt tempted to renounce my opposition to the death penalty—just as I'd reacted more than a decade earlier, when thugs in Wyoming had strung up Matthew Shepard. The 21-year-old, who’d told two men at a bar he was gay, was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fencepost and left by the duo to die. His tormenters now are serving life sentences. While Clementi endured no physical violence at the hands of Dharan Ravi and Ravi’s childhood friend, Molly Wei, their merciless contempt for his privacy arguably killed him no less surely than Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson had murdered Matthew Shepard.

The Associated Press has identified at least 12 cases in the US since 2003 in which children and young adults between 11 and 18 killed themselves after “falling victim to some form of ‘cyberbullying’—teasing, harassing or intimidating with words or pictures distributed online or via text message.” The best-known case involved a 13-year-old Missouri girl, Megan Meier, who hanged herself after she was cruelly dumped on MySpace by hoaxers posing as a teenage boy she'd worshipped. An adult was found guilty of participation in the plot, but her conviction was overturned.

Again, my gut reaction to Tyler Clementi’s suicide was that execution is too good for people who taunt or embarrass other people to death, regardless of the perpetrators’ age or understanding of the potential scope and depth of their actions. My secondary reaction, surely of no surprise to readers of this blog, was that we live in an absurdly, sadly, maddeningly over-sharing and insufficiently reflective and caring world of instantaneous communication that casts a dark shadow over all the wonders 21st-century technology is constantly delivering. When news like that of Tyler Clementi’s suicide reaches me—generally through such quaint media as the newspaper, radio or TV—I feel not only unashamed but downright smart to live largely off the social-media map, this electronic version of a spiral-bound notebook you’re reading now being my closest proximity to a Facebook page or Twitter account.

What I’ve been ruminating about at the greatest length for the past few days, however, is my third, and most deeply personal, reaction to the unthinking cruelty highlighted by the Clementi story. And that’s the call to personal responsibility and the reminder that words and actions can deeply wound, even if they rarely kill. As much as I preach kindness and rail against yielding to the temptations of mass communication and groupthink, I’m only too aware of the times in my life when I’ve willingly compromised my personal ethics while traveling a path of least resistance.

Tyler Clementi’s story transported me back to the seventh grade, when I was a dorky, pudgy, shy kid with a prosthesis instead of a right hand. I wasn’t by any stretch popular, but neither did I endure the ridicule that one girl in my class did for an oddly misshapen visage that was considerably flatter on one side than the other. Junior-high wit being what it is, she miserably endured the nickname “Pancake Face.” Seeing me, the school’s “Captain Hook,” as a likely ally, she started chatting me up and waiting for me at my locker. Ordinarily I’d have been stunned and thrilled by the attention from a member of the opposite sex, but her social toxicity was such that her attentions initially made me uneasy, and eventually hostile. I sensed that our association quickly was downgrading me in my classmates' eye from “barely tolerated” to “increasingly tarred,” so I did what cowards of all ages always have done in disadvantageous social situations: I contributed to my would-be friend's humiliation. One day, in a crowded hallway for maximum public impact, I, for the first and only time, called her not Patty but Pancake Face, and essentially told her to get lost. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fled. I don’t think we ever spoke again.

It strikes me now that this was a form of bullying. And as much as I’d love to claim otherwise, there were subsequent stains on my record. There was the time in my 20s, for instance, when I spinelessly turned against a co-worker no one else liked simply because it made my work life easier to do so. I like to think I’ve matured in the decades since, and that in many ways I've become a better person. But the truth is that the aging process and our personal circumstances tend to do a lot of that work for us. We get more comfortable in our own skins as we get older, and consequentially care less how others perceive us. Also, cocooned by our families and/or coteries of longtime friends, we tend to feel more generous toward the marginalized.

Yes, I’m shocked and appalled by stories like that of Tyler Clementi, and feel that those who drove him to suicide must be held responsible for their actions. But it’s my greater hope that the aggregate media attention being paid to such cases is serving, over time, to encourage introspection and change behaviors—especially in younger people who’ve known only the Internet age and its limitless range of scaleable peaks and slippery slopes. The observation "just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should" is a piece of timeless wisdom. And the advice “count to 10 before you act” seems more important now than ever, given the devastation precipitous actions can wreak almost instantaneously. In fact, in cyberspace, let's count out 10 minutes. Ten days, if possible, better yet.

This week I’ve been reflecting on the kid and young adult I once was and asking myself how access to today’s technologies might have broadened or narrowed, loosened or hardened, facilitated or stunted my moral and ethical growth. What I’ve concluded is that I’m just as happy, frankly, not to know.