On my feed today: The recent death of non-binary student Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old at Owasso High School in Oklahoma, after three older girls beat them to a pulp in the bathroom.
I recently made a pretty big deal about how we as human beings do not have to be special agents for Death and help its mission of bringing rot and terror upon the Earth at a faster pace, but clearly folks don’t read Big Swan enough to have seen that decree, so oops.
While Benedict’s identity does matter, no one should beat a fellow student’s head against the bathroom floor for any reason. But this is Owasso, a district at the center of much right-wing fearmongering, where a teacher resigned after their support for LGBTQ+ students became mistaken for grooming by Libs of TikTok and their ilk.
And because Benedict did identify as non-binary, this story doesn’t just become one of increasingly unchecked school violence. It becomes one of continued unabashed hatred against LGBTQ+ folks, especially younger folks.
Again: We do not have to speed along the destruction of the world, but too many of us see that as a challenge.
I have to wonder what was going through those girls’ minds as they bashed Benedict’s brains out in the bathroom. Did they for a second think what they were doing was wrong? Did they worry about what their parents would say? I wonder if their parents would ever care. What about the school? Why wasn’t an ambulance called immediately? Despite my thoughts on cops, why didn’t the school call them? When other kids passed Benedict as they stumbled through the hall after suffering their beating, did the kids wonder what had happened and offer to help, or did they turn their heads away? Did they snicker? Did they think Benedict deserved what happened?
Complete neglect on every level. You don’t have to help everyone as a human. You don’t have the bandwidth. I know that. You just have to do as good as you can in the moment. When someone wants to live their life and they’re not hurting anyone else, you let them. What was Nex Benedict doing besides trying to exist as themselves? What brought about their demise besides pure rotten hatred from their fellow students?
This is, of course, not to mention the continued legislation against Oklahoma’s LGBTQ+ and non-binary folks young and old by their state’s government. Early last year, Governor Kevin Stitt signed a plethora of bills into law, including the infamous “bathroom bill” which commands individuals to use the bathroom matching their assigned sex at birth. With the government painting a fair amount of its citizens as second-class, and with far-right moral panic artists stoking fear against LGBTQ+ and non-binary people and their allies, it is still very much open season.
Nex Benedict should still live today, as should so many other LGBTQ+ kids who got ridiculed for their identity and were either killed or took their own lives because of it. Their death should be investigated on every level, from the school to the district to the city to the state to the hearts of every Oklahoman and American. Who are we if we let something like this slide? We keep letting it slide. We have let it slide for too long.
I was sixteen once, you know. Crazy to think about that. I was fiercely loyal to my friends. A lot of my friends were either out or close; I was the straightest kid in the group. Trust me when I say this: If any of those friends of mine died because they got beat up by a bunch of thugs in a bathroom, someone’s head would be on a Spike.
Maybe that’s a metaphor. Or maybe there are certain times when one invokes the Hammurabi Code. You be the judge.
Anyway, I need to mention something fun because otherwise I will explode. The great artist Matt Farley released his latest collection of songs, this time all about the trials and tribulations of college. We should all quiver in fear at the sheer genius of Matt Farley. Listen to the 50-track playlist below:
Also this is not a sponsored paragraph but I downloaded the Real app yesterday, and it’s changed how I check my phone for sports updates forever. It provides real-time detailed play-by-play info for every game, intricate stats for players and teams, and allows for live chat before, during, and after every event to keep up with what real fans are saying. Again, this is not sponsored. I just like the app. If you are also a sports fan, consider downloading it.
This is what social media’s about, folks: Sharing things you like. (And also getting angry about injustices and clamoring for the destruction of bigotry. In fact, anyone using social media to instead spread bigotry is not using social media correctly, and is failing at life in general.)
That’s all I’ve got for this edition of Big Swan. Yes, it’s a short one. Be good to yourselves and to each other. Vaya con Dios.
Will