Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,

I have been too busy dealing with the little dramas of my own life to speak up recently. My blog, which has been an important venue for my voice has not been updated in several days. But tonight, I cannot sleep. Rehtaeh is dead, and I most stand vigil. I must speak up.

What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

As I read the news, it struck me how close we all are to a tragedy like this. Rehtaeh could easily have been my own daughter or the daughter of a friend or neighbor.

The first article I read started off,

Rehtaeh Parsons had a goofy sense of humour and loved playing with her little sisters. She wore glasses, had long, dark hair and was a straight-A student whose favourite subject was science.

What if Rehtaeh went to Amity? Maybe played sports or sang in the musical?

The horror of a teen hanging herself because she was raped at a friends house when she was fifteen and the school, society, and law enforcement officials doing nothing to help is striking; a pretty young white successful girl, with so much to offer.

Yet what if it were a young black kid in the city, with his dad in jail and his mother on drugs, getting screwed by a system that doesn't give kids like him a chance. What if he's in a school reformers want to privatize, where they want to focus on a core curriculum of filling in little dots on standardized test forms instead of gaping holes in his personal life and the fabric of his society?

What if it were a fifty-one year old woman, working in a male dominated department who was being bullied out of a job? Would we simply call it a 'personnel matter' and try to work out an agreeable severance package? Maybe some folks would even dismiss the bullying as boys being boys.

The article about Rehtaeh ended off with a reminder to all of us, with a call to speak up, to do something:

On March 3, Rehtaeh posted a photo of herself on Facebook next to a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”