(Explanation of these screencaps below.)
I don’t know, maybe this week is my week to advocate for victims and survivors of suicide, and people going through the anguish of feeling suicidal. Anyway, here’s the story:
Yesterday I posted this (text repeated below), because I was watching @andersonlive and @Yvettenbrown was co-hosting - they were talking about Radcliffe Franklin Haughton who murdered people and then took his own life. Ms. Brown remarked that she didn’t know why people have to kill others before they “take the cowards’ way out”.
I can never understand why people think it’s okay to publicly smear all suicidal people by calling them “cowards” - and it’s like a knife in chest for the parents, spouses, siblings, children and friends (the ‘survivors’) to hear that when they’re already trying to cope with an unimaginable situation.
Then a man from Oregon, John Buckland, was introduced as a guest on the show, because in Oregon the Boy Scouts were just required to release their secret records of all the sexual abuse committed against young boys that was covered up by the Boy Scouts. Mr. Buckland said his recovery has been long and difficult, and included getting into drugs and several suicide attempts.
So I posted this yesterday:
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@andersonlive To @yvettenbrown and people like her: Please stop judging suicidal people as “cowards”.
Ms. Brown, how did it feel hearing John Buckland talk about his experiences, having been molested by his assistant boy scout master and later becoming suicidal - just minutes after you referred to suicidal people as “cowards”?
And how do you think the families of people who’ve committed suicide feel when you judge their loved-ones that way, never having even met them?
Please, just shut up.
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The screencapped tweets at the top are in response to that post. As you can see from the first 3 screencaps showing Ms. Brown’s and my “discussion” tonight, she did not seem to want to consider that she may have said the wrong thing, nor that her words were taken that way. My point has nothing to do with the murderer, it has to do with all of the people out there who are suicidal, who will be suicidal in the future, and who have committed suicide - and for all of the families who love them. Referring to suicidal people as “cowards” on national TV, is cruel -even if a featured guest on the show isn’t currently suicidal.
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt a couple of times, but she was sort of railing at me and defensive rather than having a simple discussion. When people get defensive and start attacking without hearing what the other person says…well, usually that means a nerve has been struck.
She tries to say she was calling Haughton a coward because of what he specifically did, hiding in a car - and I’d like to believe her - but none of the rest of her dialogue here nor her initial remark on Anderson Live support that.
So after all of her (IMO) self-righteousness and hypocrisy she had the nerve to say “Shame on you!” to me.
And then some celeb-cruiser guy jumped in to lecture me and try to tell me how to behave, and she told him that her “Shame on you!” was well-placed (pic 4 above, bottom right).
And so I told her to fuck off.
She told me to “tumblr this”, so I am.
Some of the time stamps on the tweet screencaps seem out of sequence because I had to pull the tweets from my stream and tick-tock, the clock kept ticking as I was doing so.
I had to do that because you won’t find any of those tweets in her twitter stream, since she deleted them immediately after the encounter.
Had she not deleted the tweets I probably would’ve dropped this, but I thought that was telling.
Now *there’s* a woman who knows a thing or two about cowards.
