Respecting the Dignity of Every Single Person

Last updated on: February 3, 2016 at 8:37 am by Anne Kennedy

Respecting the Dignity of Every Single Person 2016-02-03T08:37:41-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I took the time to watch this whole sticker boy video last night. And then I watched it again because it was so amazing.

So, as I have sometimes remarked, I have six children, the oldest 13, the youngest going to be five in less than a week, and I was just in the way of finally getting my 13 year old in for her 11 year booster shots. We toddled over to the pediatrician and had as nice a time as you can when you go to the doctor, which is to say, not that nice of a time, but not the worst time Ever either. We had to go through the paper work that comes with turning into an adolescent, and Elphine (not her real name, though, don’t we all wish it was) was shocked and horrified by the questions being asked of her. It was the usual stuff–mental illness, suicide, drug use, sex, more stuff about sex, alcohol abuse, some stuff about sex, and then, of course, eating disorders. She laughed a lot, in total horror, her eyebrows arched in wonder. I wasn’t shocked, though I had been dreading that very form for a whole lot of months. As I glanced down the list of insanity, my stomach worked itself into a knot and I worried about all the people I can’t even pray for because I don’t even know them, and then felt guilty about forgetting to pray for the young girls I do know, right here in my neighborhood, for whom these things are the stuff of life.

I’ve always said I homeschool as the last resort, not because I’m trying to protect my kids from “the world” but because I want them to have the emotional and spiritual health to not just cope with that world, but to go out into it for good and not for ill. No young girl should have that list as the markers of her life experience at the age of thirteen. How will she go forward into life as anything more than a victim of grief and trouble? But rather than those things being the outlying exception, they are the norm, in my community anyway. The strange thing was not that the questions had to be asked, but that my child was able to say no for the whole list. I don’t take that as a triumph. I am not an exceptional parent. I am only doing the thing that is in front of me. ‘We are very far gone,’ I kept saying to myself, right there at the doctor’s, ‘there is no health in us.’

What does this have to do with Sticker Boy? Well, while sexually active little girls with eating disorders are beating their way through life in the average American government school, there is chubby Sticker Boy deliberately mocking the single female democratic candidate as she makes her speech. Was he also formed and shaped through the ranks of a government school? Who are his parents? Under what set of cultural norms is it acceptable to mockingly disrespect the candidate for President at such a moment? I sat there and wondered and wondered and wondered about his parents. I wondered if they would be angry, or if they would think it was funny, or if they wouldn’t care. If he were in a position to speak to Mrs. Clinton and shake her hand, would he say ,”hey” or would he say “ma’am”? What is his understanding of himself?

And yet, I would say, it is fitting that that spectacle should be going on behind a candidate who has worked so tirelessly to undermine the dignity and identity of women everywhere. I know that’s not what she says. She’s running as a woman for the women. But dignity begins with life, and life has to have value, it has to be something that we think is worth it. The injustice of an economic system that keeps women poor, that keeps the death of the infant at the center, that keeps free sex as the norm, that undermines the parents as the primary nurturers of childhood identity, is logically going to lead you to the hideousness of Sticker Boy. It’s funny for a few minutes, but when all the laughing is done I am only left with a burden of sadness.

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