You've all heard about it by now.  An 18-year-old Rutgers freshman jumped off the George Washington Bridge yesterday.  A gifted violinist, loved by his friends and family, decided it was better to take his own life than live with the humiliation of having a video of his gay sexual encounter - in his own dorm room - plastered all over the Internet.  And to have another encounter broadcast live.

His dorm roommate hid cameras all over their rooms, secretly.  His dorm roommate went to a female friend's dorm room, activated the cameras, and recorded and broadcast what the cameras showed.  His dorm roommate boasted of what he had done on a social network.

And isn't it fun?  Isn't it fun to decide that privacy is something your dorm roommate doesn't deserve?  Isn't is fun to dare people to come, come see your roommate have sex with another dude, live?  All good clean fun, isn't it?  It's just a joke, right?  No harm, no foul, right?  Right?

Wrong.  Wrong because someone else's privacy isn't yours to take away at your whim.  Wrong because it's not a joke, it's not good clean fun; it's death, and indescribable sorrow for the survivors.  Wrong because a life full of promise has ended because of you.

Yes, you.  Nobody else can be blamed.  You set up the cameras.  You didn't tell your roommate they were there.  You broadcast the camera feed on the Internet.  You bragged about it.  You took the "credit", if one can even call it that.

And what kind of punishment even comes close to being appropriate?  This isn't murder, technically.  You didn't plan on having your roommate kill himself -- at least, society would like to think so; but maybe, just maybe, you did.

And now he's dead.  Because of you and your accomplice.

God help me, I would like nothing better than to have you and your female accomplice tossed off the George Washington Bridge.  To feel the rush of air as you fall hundreds of feet toward the Hudson River.  To know the feelings of panic and helplessness and hopelessness your victim felt.  To feel the hard, hard water destroying your body, ending your life, taking away all the promise that was within you.

But it won't bring back the man you both killed.

I remember Matthew Shepard's parents in court, saying they didn't want their son's killers put to death.  They wanted them to live and to be reminded every single day of the person whose life they took.

And so should both of you.

It should be made that both of your social networks are demolished.  That when you log on and try to tweet or use Facebook or Myspace or any of the others, all you see is the face of the man you forced to kill himself.  His face, smiling, looking out at you.

And when you both go to jail as you both so richly deserve, I'd like you to know on the most primal levels just what it feels like when you have no privacy.  At all.  From anyone.  At any time.  Ever.

Talking back to my Representative.  The following is an e-mail I sent to Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11th District, NJ) in response to his "e-news" sent to his constituents.  For those of you who are not in New Jersey, or not in the 11th District, you might find yourself in agreement with some of the things I say to him.
=======
Dear Congressman Frelinghuysen:

I have read your recent e-News and feel I must tell you, as a Republican and as a constituent, where I think you're wrong.

In the matter of tax hikes:  President G.W. Bush managed to take a surplus left to him by President Clinton and, through what I can only think of as gross incompetence, turn it into a massive deficit that will need to be paid off by our children and grandchildren.  An incompetently-run war in Afghanistan, a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans, the Medicaid prescription program, and the massive financial collapse of this country's largest institutions because of the relaxing of  fiscal regulations -- all contributed to the state in which we find ourselves today.  For you to say the Obama Administration is "addicted to spending", when there was not so much as a murmur from you about the disastrous spending policies of the Bush Administration, is frankly ludicrous.

We have a debt to pay.  In the real world -- not the insulated dream world of Congress -- if you have a debt to pay, you have two options:  make more money, or spend less.  The United States has been acting as though this basic rule does not apply to itself.

I am no fan of higher taxes.  However, since Congress, and especially Congressional Republicans in their "Pledge to America", fail to give specifics on where spending will be cut, the only other option is making more money.  You and I both know that will include raising taxes.

The American people may grumble.  But they won't retaliate if you and your fellow Representatives and Senators of both parties take the time to educate them on both the "why" and the "what" of what your actions.  Without that education, then yes, if you start belt-tightening then you'll lose your job -- and you'll deserve it.

Every President, every Congress, has faced hard decisions and made some unpopular ones.  Those who made the effort to convince the citizenry of the rightness of their cause -- and did so without recourse solely to fantasies of what might happen if the "other side" got its way -- found their efforts rewarded come election time.  (Consider FDR and his Fireside Chats, especially the ones explaining bank holidays and Lend-Lease.)

Regarding so-called "ObamaCare":  I have been unemployed for over two years now.  I do not have a chance in hell of getting private health insurance.  With ObamaCare, there is the opportunity to end my worries of having something catastrophically expensive happen to me.  The day you vote to repeal "ObamaCare" is the day I start working for your Democratic opponent.

Finally, comparing pensions for union members, negotiated with auto makers over the years at contract time, with general benefits of salaried non-union employees (or as they're otherwise known, "management") is the most colossal red herring I have seen in ages.  Non-union employees' benefits are not guaranteed by contract (except at the very highest levels) and are subject to the whim of top executives and the board of directors.  From where I stand, in order to make up for this "inequality", salaried non-union employees should be encouraged to, and allowed to, unionize to give them the right to bargain collectively for contractually-guaranteed benefits.

I leave you with this final request:  If you or one of your aides is going to send me the standard "thank you for writing" letters, save the paper (or the e-mail).  If, however, you want to discuss what I've written, then by all means contact me.

Yours, 

Allen Neuner

The ends justify the means...  I've been over at Facebook reading various friends' comments on the failure of the so-called Democratically-controlled Senate to gather 60 votes to allow the defense policy bill -- containing a conditional repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy -- to proceed to a vote on the floor of the Senate.  Every Republican Senator except one voted against the vote.  (The one was Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who didn't vote at all.)  And three Democratic Senators voted against the vote:  both Senators from Arkansas, including Blanche Lincoln, who faced a stiff challenge in the primaries and looks set to be in a brutal fight against her Republican opponent.  And Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, who brought the bill to the floor expecting a vote to proceed.

Reid can be excused for his vote.  He wants to bring the bill back during the lame duck session of Congress post-elections, and can do so only if he voted with the majority when the bill was defeated.  It's a political maneuver only, based on the Senate's own rules, to keep the bill alive until the new Congress can be sworn in.

The Democrats -- the original gang that couldn't shoot straight -- went down by four votes.  Three were from their own party, which shows that party discipline is a joke among this particular party.  But they needed just one Republican to go along with all the Democrats, and they couldn't convince any of them.  This in a country where a majority of its citizens, from all parts of the political spectrum, support repeal of this policy.  The Democrats just couldn't get their act together.

Well, you may ask, what about all those nasty, vote-in-lock-step Republicans?  Quite a few of them have supported repeal in the past; why didn't they vote to allow this bill to go to the floor?  Judging from the reported comments, there were two big complaint.  One is that this bill -- which hasn't been prevented from going to a vote in over 40 years -- contained too many non-financial provisions.  Like the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell".  And the REACH program, designed to get fast-track citizenship for certain illegal aliens who meet specific criteria.

And the other big complaint?  That the bill was being rammed through, with the Republicans not being given sufficient chance to add amendments of their own before any vote would be taken.

I don't know how true or accurate either of these complaints are.  But the fact is that Republican supporters of repeal, who are not ones to give much heed to the more reactionary members of their party on this issue, voted against letting the bill come to a floor vote.  And they are the ones using these complaints as reasons.

So:  bad enough the Democrats have, once again where GLBT rights are concerned, shown weakness and cowardice in place of strength and boldness.  Bad enough the Republicans have felt, rightly or wrongly, that they're being railroaded into voting for something of which they do not approve, and about which they feel they've had no hand in crafting.

But I've got to point my finger, also, at all those who believed two things.

First, that the best way to get social legislation passed is to tack it onto a bill, any bill, used to fund any major part of government -- whether the legislation is related to the bill's main purpose or not.  This time, it was a bill giving (among other things) long-needed pay raises to servicemen and servicewomen.  And at least it was a military policy change tacked onto a military funding bill.  This is, boiled down to its essence, the old policy that "the end justifies the means".  Doesn't matter how you get something done, as long as that something is "for the greater good".  But really, people -- didn't your mothers teach you better?

Second, that you could get away with number one above by tacking it to a bill involved with funding a vital governmental function.  Because no one in their right mind would vote against a funding bill, would they?  No one would vote against pay raised for enlisted men and women, right?  Against funding the continuing operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan?  Against keeping the search for Osama Bin Laden alive and active, right?

Well, the bluff has been called.   And now there is no Plan B; and the sounds of  the weeping and the gnashing of teeth are heard throughout the land.

Forgive me if I don't join in.