Let's talk a little about Keaton Jones. I hope you will follow along and retweet this THREAD. facebook.com/kimberly.jones… 
The first thing to say is I am genuinely happy his fortunes seem to be turning. There's a picture of him smiling with some football players that's especially nice.
Often lately it seems like something happens on social media, and I start thinking about it, and I can't even get my thoughts together before the story explodes.
The speed of the progression of stories today is new and unheard of in human history. That's not necessarily good, but we'll pass that for a minute.
What I'd like to talk about first is that while there have been a very large number of posts about Keaton, and they are all universally sympathetic, but I wonder if the people who answered are listening. Really listening.
So, let's do that. First of all, what are the circumstances of the video? The original video is posted on his mother's facebook page. Here's the link: facebook.com/kimberly.jones…
Keaton Jones: Just out of curiosity, why do they bully? What - what's the point of it? Why do they enjoy taking innocent people and finding a way to be mean to them? It's not OK.
Kimberly Jones: What do they say to you?
Keaton Jones: They call me - they make fun of my nose, they call me ugly, they say I have no friends.
Kimberly Jones: What did they do to you at lunch?
Keaton Jones: Poured milk on me and put ham down my clothes, threw bread on me.
Kimberly Jones: Is it just you?
Keaton Jones: Yep
Kimberly Jones: Or is it other kids too that feel that way?
Keaton Jones: I'd say it's other kids too.
Kimberly Jones: How does that make you feel?
Keaton Jones: I think they do it to me enough they should know why they do it to other people because, not OK. (Crying) People that are different, don't need to be criticized about it. It's not their fault. (Pause)
Keaton Jones: But, if you are made fun of you should don't - let it bother you, stay strong, I guess. Hard. But - it'll probably get better one day. (Looks away in tears).
So, just to go through it, Keaton starts out attempting to ask an intellectual question, directed at his abusers, namely why? What do you get out of hurting people? But he quickly breaks down. The pain and fear of his experience is too powerful.
His mother asks him clearly, directly, what they say. It's the kind of conversation a mother has when she is speaking to a child but there are other parents present. She wants them to hear what has happened.
I think she wants the other parents (possibly the parents of the actual tormentors) to see what they have been doing to her boy.
Of course, she can have no idea the video will find a wider audience. I don't think anyone ever expects to go viral unless it's their job to do so.
I think it's pretty obvious Keaton is leaving out what his tormentors call him, and probably other things, too. That's normal. It's just too painful.
One of the things about Kimberly is that she gives me a sense of being fairly tough. So, Keaton is explaining, essentially, to her, his mother. That's pretty hard. And in that situation a boy doesn't tell all. Even when he's hurting. It's too embarrassing.
When I was about Keaton's age, there was a cat that belonged to the neighbors, which would come over into our yard. I had a cat of my own, and the neighbor's cat, Jingles, would regularly go after him. Jingles was huge, unneutered Tom.
One day I was in the garage, the garage door was open, and Jingles came into the garage and started fighting with my cat. I took a stick, possibly a mop handle, and poked him, and wacked Jingles with it a few times pretty hard on the back.
Jingles responded by pouncing on my leg and biting me, hard, which drew blood, and then he took off running. It was a pretty good bite through my pant-leg. It hurt, and was bleeding steadily.
After that I ran into the house and showed my mother the bite. She promptly went over to the neighbor's house and got the cat's owner. It's possible I hid the mop handle at this stage.
She insisted I show the cat's owner my bleeding leg, dripping blood on the garage floor. I don't remember what I said to my Mom, but I have a clear memory of lying to the owner.
He asked me if I had provoked Jingles. My mother responded in hysterics, was insisting I would never do anything to provoke the cat and that the attack was not my fault.
I lied. I lied through my teeth. "I didn't do anything to him. He just bit me for no reason."
Then my mother demanded that Jingles be put down, and the neighbor reluctantly agreed. My mother insisted that Jingles should be killed, due to what I knew to be a perfectly reasonable attempt at self-defence on his part.
My cat was simply in Jingle's territory. Jingles knew it, his owner knew it, I knew it. Everybody knew it.
This was something I kept inside for a long time: I had caused the death of an innocent creature through lying; and my mother had been an all-too willing accomplice. I had done something seriously wrong but there was no punishment forthcoming.
I think that Kimberly Jones is different from my mother. I don't judge her, but how is posting a facebook video the right response to school bullying? What about talking to the Principal? Maybe she was going to or already had.
There is some irony in the fact that Facebook is notorious for running a platform of cyber-bullying, but we'll pass that. dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar…
But this was Keaton's choice, his idea even, to post a video. This is something that must be very modern: instinctively the platform for bullying both pro and con is social media. Specifically Facebook.
My mother's immediate instinct would have been to confront the school, and only then document my pain, then and there, in person, for the officialdom. She would have made an awful scene.
I hope Keaton's parents intended to do that also. Maybe they still will. I also hope other people in that community complain to the School Board.
But I don't expect them to. People are all too willing to accept the status quo and allow the abuse to go on because they accept the premise that being different is being bad. That's bullshit. Being different is not being bad.
As a Californian in Florida, my mother's approach to the problem of outsiderism was essentially to believe that we were better than the people around us. I was encouraged to share this view.
This information had a powerful impact on my development. It made it possible for me to be different and to embrace difference and originality all through my life.
But, I also was aware of being a liar. I had done wrong and she had condoned it. The neighbor was not as stupid as he seemed. He knew what had happened. Everyone knew.
Not all children are loved in this complete way. So my instinct about Keaton is this open question, does he feel loved. The picture with the football players shows a completely changed boy. A beautiful boy.
This leads me to the second thing I wanted to say, not about the video itself, but about the response to it from celebrities, etc.
First of all it's wonderful that people wanted to help, and more importantly it seems like some of them actually did. That's very positive, of course.
In my experience, most people in the world want to do good. They have good intentions. But - it's really hard to actually help people. So to succeed here for one kid, that's beautiful.
Where I live, a lot of people buy lottery tickets. Why do people buy lotto? Well, my guess is they feel pretty hopeless. I always thought of lotto (somewhat callously) as an idiot tax. But really it's poor people's hope.
There is no possible way Keaton or his mother could know the video would, in a sense, pay off. And it's not wrong that it did. Like the lottery, life sometimes rewards you when you are down. But it's not a sure thing.
The problem is that star-studded support and tweets is not a substitute for a real solution to bullying at Horace Maynard Middle School, and schools like it all over the country. Which few of those people are talking about.
Will Keaton Jones not be victimized anymore? One would hope not. But for the great mass of kids who get bullied, superheroes don't help them. Football stars don't help them. No one helps. If all those kids made videos, would they help?
I don't think so.
Unfortunately, the rush to support Keaton hides a somewhat dark fact, which is that social media causes vastly more bullying than it solves.
And Keaton's basic question is still unanswered: why do they do it? The answer is very important right now, just at a time when Americans are busily brutalizing every outsider group they can find, and have elected a bully as a President.
Keaton says some disturbing things about being different. For example, he seems to accept that he is different. It's not altogether clear to me how he is. To me, he seems to be just a fairly ordinary kid.
My stepfather had a child, a young girl. She was an adorable girl, but she had big ears.
The ears were from her father. Both had ears which stuck out bigly.
My stepfather, who had been mercilessly bullied as a child over those ears, took his beautiful daughter to a surgeon who essentially cut off most of her ear in an effort to make her look "normal."
I have a clear memory of talking about this with my stepfather. He was adamant that the surgery was much better than the prospect of her being bullied. This was in Florida, perhaps 1976.
It's pretty shocking, if you think about it. Are we that sick, as a people, that we must enforce sameness in order to avoid being ostracized? Does this sickness persist all through so many years of American culture? What is wrong with people?
