Social responsibility and the S-word

Anyone who knows me can attest to at least one single fact: I have a sailor's mouth. Like most people I know, I spend my youngest years in a household where swearing was simply not allowed. It was [supposedly] unChristian-like, and of course, noone likes to see a child swear. I held off swearing longer than many people, and my first month or so of cursing life was awkward. "Fffff-uck," I'd exclaim, or, "You know what? f-UCK you." Don't let anyone fool you--cursing well is an artform, and one I would like to think I have mastered.

However--also, many would attest, there are words that I just do not say. . I don't say GD because I do put respect in the Bible, and I show my respect for Big Guns Upstairs by doing my best to refrain from taking his name in vain. I don't say the n-word-that-is-degrading-to-black-people, or the f-word-that-is-degrading-to-gay-people. I never say that anything I don't like is "gay," because--as it has been said many times--"gay" and "stupid" are not synonymous words. I believe that most curse words never hurt anyone, but these words hurt everyone--the people who say them, the people who they degrade. Words are powerful--they hurt in ways you never even imagined.

So it's nice to know that someone out there is showing a little responsibility.

And, here's something I thought I would never say: That someone is MTV. Keep in mind that I am part of a generation that grew up, literally, with MTV. We're approximately the same age. We cannot remember a world in which music videos and The Real World did not exist. I know that I myself once loved coming home to an episode of TRL, and I spent my summers watching people butcher Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'" on Say What? Karaoke. But, in the past couple of years, MTV and I parted ways. It became too obnoxious, too "holy shit, I turned the TV on six hours later and ANOTHER guy is doing a jello shot off of ANOTHER girl's ass."

However: on Tuesday, Joey informed me that he had watched MTV the other day, and that they had decided to censor the new-ish Sean Kingston song, "Beautiful Girls." Now, I'm not a fan of censorship, and I'm still waiting for the word "ass" to show back up in that Fergie song I love so much. But I fully stand behind MTV's decision to cut out the word "suicidal."

Suicide is no joke. It is not glamorous, it is not beautiful, it is heart-breaking. Perhaps you wonder why I have any right to say those things. So I will qualify my suicide experiences with you.

First: one of my best high school friend's father committed suicide when I was seventeen. If this is not personal enough for your tastes, consider this: I was the one who had to tell her. Noone who ever had to say the words, "Your father shot himself; he's dead" to a friend would ever believe that suicide is beautiful.

Second: I saw how my parents reacted to my "suicide." Mind you, this is a unique experience in that I never tried to kill myself, nor would I ever try. However, in the midst of receiving treatment and testing for bipolar disorder, I went home for a weekend. In the middle of the night, I snuck out of the house to see Joey, leaving a note on my bed to explain to my parents where I had gone. While I was gone, someone shot a gun outside my home. My parents woke up, and because I had been in some depression, they immediately worried that I had taken my own life. The situation was exascerbated by the fact that I was not in bed. My mom called my cell phone, absolutely panicked. There are no words, honestly, to describe the tone of voice a parent has upon realizing--or even thinking--a child has died by his or her own hand. Noone who has ever heard that voice would ever believe that suicide is glamorous.

Yet, there is this long-standing cult of mystique and tragedy and glory behind suicide. Romeo and Juliet die by their own hands because they can't be together. Jeffrey Eugenides's virgin sisters throw themselves off of roofs and stick their heads in ovens because they want to escape their overbearing parents. Esther Greenwood just can't get out from under that bell jar, and even if she escapes suicide, her writer didn't.

I'm not saying that it's bad to write about suicide--the world is not perfect or beautiful. Suicide happens, and it is sad. But I do support MTV's decision to bleep out a word that--when used flippantly, with no qualification--can be harmful to those who hear it.

Which leaves me with only one thing to say, the most beautiful and true sentence about suicide you will ever hear:

fuck the poets of the past, my friends
there are no beautiful suicides
just cold corpses with shit in their pants
and the end of the gifts
[postsecret]