Some nameless chick did herself in

Stated like that maybe the utter ridiculousness of it all creeps up on you.

There's what, ten million blondy chicks struggling to grow up as uneducated and useless as at all possible in Canada, part of a larger contingent all over the uncivilised world (ex civilised world, not so very long ago). None of them are interesting or remarkable to the point of their name being remembered the day afterⁱ. None of them "is special", and on the open market none of them is worth the price of a decent burial, even if you exclude the clothes.

That aside, the event does carry some meaning and some importance, for those that will listen to events rather than to people.

I. That zero polerance tolicy against "bullying" nonsense produced exactly zero measurable results. The reasons are quite strong : on one hand, bullying is perfectly normal behaviour. It's how children learn about their place in society, and more importantly learn how to cope with their (marginal, undesirable, re-roll worthy) place in society. There's no such thing as "everyone's the center of attention" outside of everyone's very own imagination and consequently most people will have to learn to deal with not being the center of attention. Ever. In their entire life, not once.

That they would prefer to not learn all this, that they would instead prefer to pretend there's a god who actually keeps track ; that they'd instead prefer to make-believe that there's some government conspiracy which actually cares about whatever random schmuck personally (and in furtherance of this nonsense, insist the government pay people to fig them periodically) is all perfectly true. It's also perfectly besides the point : when all is said and done the center of the circle is a geometric reality, not something left up to social negotiation, and even less to social reform.

On the other hand, there's no such thing nor can there be such a thing as "crimes of perception". Rape can not be "that which makes the woman feel raped". Bullying can not be "that which makes the worthless feel worthless". If anyone is foolish enough to start introducing "crimes of perception" in their actual legal code (like the US has been so far) the net result will be a total mess, because people will continue to feel like they feel.

The worthless will continue to feel worthless. There's positively nothing exterior that can be done to make the worthless feel better about themselves, be it a pill or an ellaborate, society-wide play. The women will continue to feel raped. It goes in for chrissakes, it makes its way through blood oh the horror!

And so the edges will start blurring out and the lines become more and more indistinct until that inevitable point in the rather proximate future when the entire legal code is thrown out as impractical - which is to say, incapable to distinguish dream from reality. 'Cause it just so happens that's one of the primary symbolic functions of the code of laws, and it also happens to be the reason why play-pretend and make-believe don't go over so well in any functional court system.

So in short : if you outlaw mocking girls 'cause some girl killed herself "because she was being mocked", you will not get fewer less girls killing themselves. You will get more. Which brings us right to the second point on our agenda,

II. Normalizing all human behaviour is both impossible practically and undesirable theoretically. Society does work rather mechanically : pressures coil springs which then push other things. Take for instance the geek : that lanky kid that sucked at sports in school, was a little timid and a little "weird". Well... that's everything, that covers all the ways to impress teenage girls. So he gets no girls, goes to college a virgin and is clearly confronted with a future of failure. Yet it wasn't known as "4ever alone", then. Why not ?

Possibly because the social statement at the time was quite personal : "You, Jessup R. Geek, suck. Unlike the other kids, you suck." and so the geek found he personally had a simple alternative : conform and suck or struggle and see what can be made of it. Out of that struggle to regain one's place and standing in the world came the determination and the energy to put all the long hours into coding, into research, into all that boring, dirty, complicated, finicky and ultimately unrewarding work that made the computer and the Internet and the cell phone.

Fifty years later, the social statement was quite different : "Nobody sucks. Everyone's special." - notice the complete absence of personal rapport in there. The result ? 4ever alone! If random schmucks aren't singled out for disproportionate and unfair mistreatment, random schmucks have no incentive to ever do anything. Oh, you dream of a better world, one where people toil and push not because they're mistreated, but because... they just want to ? Bully for you. Do you know who else dreams this exact, but exact same dream ? Some people who think that capitalism is sorely mistaken in allocating the resources to the resourceful, and instead dream of a better world, one where people work not in order to have more resources than their fellow man, but because... they just want to.

Nobody "just wants to". The incentives to labour are money and fame. Both money and fame. Stop trying to dick around with these pillars of wealth and power and you will stop having to salvage the ruins of your life from the smoking remains of the despicable place you thought was "a better world".

1. "The truth is pain and sweat... and paying bills and making love to a woman that you don't love anymore. The truth is dreams that don't come true... and nobody prints your name in the paper till the day you die. Now, here. The truth is you never grew up." Who said that ? [↩]