So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?
– Wish You Were Here
UPDATE: The original inciting post has since been taken down, but only after reaching 40 thousand likes. 40. thousand. OP has since apologized, but in what seems to be the most vain way. People continue to commentate, offering perspectives no-one asked for, while others stalk him under his private account. The furry fandom has, essentially, colluded with outside non-furs to make this as painful as possible for those involved. I wonder sometimes if given the hindsight of our past mistakes are we better-equipped to make sure they never occur again -- are we doomed forever to have blood on our hands? I now see the answer. Some of you are going to hell. The worst part? You won't even care.
UPDATE UPDATE: Nevermind. After reading into the thread a bit more, and OP themself, I can say this -- OP is a piece of shit and so is half the people involved in this. Rot.
I DID NOT originally intend to write this. I was more than happy to move onto playing videogames, enjoy myself, and share a new perspective on a beloved experience. This article is not a part of the Echo series, and I consider the Echo series largely complete. Yet today I saw something so horrid – so wretched – so contemptible and hateable, that it would feel unjust to do anything else than condemn everyone involved.
I must preface this by stating my biases; I am left-leaning politically, and I am vehemently against capital punishment. I am also against punitive justice, and hold firm beliefs in the strength of rehabilitative justice. I am similarly a believer of nurture in the nature versus nurture debate, and all of my aforementioned opinions can be seen as downstream of this. It’s only reasonable, then, for me to believe that people have the capability to change, and we should never condemn a man to the state he is unless in death or detainment, of either the bodily or societal kind. Knowing all of this – What the hell is wrong with you people?
The furry fandom has, hypocritically, never taken well to the ill. To the furry fandom there is starkly two kinds of suffering – the wholesome and the real. Depressive self-depreciation is more than accepted, being as much as expected of the average member online. Similarly is BPD and Bipolar Disorder. These things being accepted, surely then, is a great thing, no? I would say yes, of course, but only in another world where such a double-standard for the neurotic did not exist.
Furries cannot stand what I want to call icky ill people. The sort of ill people that make you feel bad and sad and all of these other unrelatable things that, for whatever reason, just aren’t quite that describable – or sympathetic – to you. This illness is not one of relatable self-depreciation, nor of the struggle innate of man, but of a perversion of the mind the likes of which you would see only represented earnestly in horror. The annoying – The brazen – The two-left-footed bad-mouthed slow-thinking loud-being spasmodic-sporadic unlikable-unwanted unfunny-unbeing unkillable ill. The depressives that aren’t funny. The bipolars that aren’t predictable. The schizophrenics that, truly, make no sense. Those that can only be described in descending order by a list of 1800’s-dated pejoratives. These are the icky ill. They are to be shunned and screamed at and put into a stockade for the world village to throw tomatoes and winged-words at. Furries, as if they are looking into the abyss, look into these ill people, and see the discarded parts of themselves they never want to see again.
If you are reading this, then it is likely you know who I am referring to at this point. If you do, then, you may remind me – Oh, what a horrid person he is! – Oh, how we’ve tried to help him! – Oh, don’t baby the ill! To this, I must respond cordially and explain the issue with these thoughts, but, to put it shortly to a select few people – damn you.
Bad people do exist, yes. This is an undeniable fact. What isn’t, however, is that bad people must exist. If this was true, then every other childhood home would be nothing but a field of cinders. No, I must insist, people are made this way, and, even this late into their badness, there is never a true condemnation or nailing of their character until their final death. For these reasons, to do what you have done because a person is bad and ill – as if good and ill is a suitable combination – is beyond unreasonable and something short of evil itself. You have all the tools in the toolshed and a wit sharper than the spade within – and this is how you chose to use it? You choose to use it to belittle, rob, belie those with only rusted remnants? You have all the power to choose and help, to choose and forgive, or, God forbid, to choose and ignore, and this is the course of action you have taken? To display the already-shamed out to a crowd of thousands, raking in injury after injury after injury to fuel further this downward-spiraling inward-terminating free-fall? And for what? Because he’s bad? Because he did a bad thing? So much so that we must do that which only would reaffirm this, destining him to this unfortunate selfness forever? Yes, he may even be a bad person. Do we cut off the hand of the child who drew on the wall? Are all prisoners doomed to life sentences? Must the cheater be forever known as the whore, bar love eternally? Why, I ask? Why?
Oh, but you’ve helped him, haven’t you? You’ve helped him by speaking in terms rational only to the sane, but totally deluded and inane to the irrational. You’ve told him to be real in a world where being real has gotten him shamed and scolded. You’ve turned every interaction into a therapist's farce, woefully unprepared and unequipped for the true burgeoning of the ill mind, surprised when the ill fail to meet the expectations of the well. Does he even exist to you anymore? Between the ethernet cable and the internet service provider, has his consciousness been distilled behind so many pixels as to become an outlet for your perception of an ill man? Do you earnestly wish to help? Or do you, like so many before you, only help because it’ll make you feel better, as if you have some savior-complex fetish that oh so desperately needs filling? Or do you help for an even worse reason? Do you help because you know he will spiral? Because you chase that high of someone else’s low? So that you, too, can join the laughing crowd, pointing your fingers, laughing in judgement at the shivering surrounded animal? Do you earnestly think that your help, online, can help him? Do you not think help elsewhere has tried, in reality, but failed equally? Do you use this as justification to call him truly helpless, something only a hairs-width away from despicable, to be ruined again and again for eternity? Do you use this as justification to call what has come to him as his fault, and his fault alone, ignoring the bullet-holes in his chest caused by countless firing-lines? Are there truly the unsavable, or an unfitting society?
The ill still have a free-will, you may tell me. You may tell me he is an adult. You may tell me he has faced consequences for his actions several times and has come crawling back nonetheless the same. You may ask me why I should even care. To this, I ask – who are you? He who is able-bodied? Well-equipped? He who is able to laugh-along a crowd at the downtrodden? He who has acceptance in ways unfathomable to the other? He who has silent refuge in his own mind? He who still has lifelines available? Why, must I ask, can we not feel empathy for the broken? Why must we wish the ill ill-will? Why must we wish them more suffering? More loneliness? Death? Why must we use the same tools brought down on us to condemn those outside our taste? Are you not also one bad week away from delirium? Tell me, what do you gain by cursing them? By swearing at them? By telling awful campfire-side recollections of your time with them? You have all to make them lose, and yet you do it for the most marginal of gains. You laugh in their face and invite others similarly, then bloat about follower count afterwards. You make every interaction ever involving them a spectacle. You make them out to be something less-than-human and then are surprised when your self-fullfilling prophecy is brought to truth.
I want to backpedal for a moment and talk about why I even care about this. For all I have gathered, from every interaction with this man – everyone hates him. I cannot use a stronger word – despite, dislike, loath, whatever all seem equal parts failing. They hate this man. They hate him so much that it makes me wonder – what is this fandom? This fandom, which I was promised as being the weird, the accepting, the equal parts lovely and neurotic ? This fandom, which I have seen undue love and forgiveness dispersed, something short of sainthood – This fandom, which I have seen raise those ill from the gutters, to their promised ideal heights, sharing the spoils of the good life with likeminded friends. This fandom, whose sheer existence seems to endlessly battle those that would want us dead – the fascists, the homophobes, the racists and the bigots. Why do we, then, use the tools they do? Why do we enable the LOLcow-ification of someone so clearly needing help again? No, I do not think they need immediate forgiveness – a single giant “Hurrah!” and roses thrown in their wake. What they need is silence. Help. A small forgiveness in lieu of the barrage of condemnations so uncharacteristic of ourselves. So tell me, then, why must I be the bleeding-heart fool rabble-rousing about forgiveness and the ill? What must they do? Do they have to be normal? Can they even ask for forgiveness? They quiet, and a deafening roar in their absence raises! – yet they talk and speak to those around them, and everyone else stills, quiet, like onlooking insect-observers to a rotting carcass in the watershed, waiting to see if he will rise again.
