For Nex Benedict

Hello friends,

This isn’t an easy musing this week. But that’s life, isn’t it? Some weeks feel harder than others. It doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your presence here. As a matter of fact, your presence always gives me hope.

So this week I ask: How do we keep creating when the world is so hard for so many people? We remember that creativity is one of the great human goods. At least, I do.

As a person who believes that everyone deserves justice, some weeks the news hits harder than others. But I still find ways to create. And this past couple of weeks, as a queer and gender nonconforming person? Sometimes I am filled with rage. Not only are trans and queer people being killed in Darfur and Palestine—along with too many others—but across the world, crack downs on the very existence of LGBTQ+ people increases daily.

Sixteen year old Nex Benedict was badly beaten by three other students in a school bathroom. He died the next day. I needed to sit with this for a week. I needed to go for walks with this for a week. Finally, I sat down and wrote something. It was not a nice, friendly something, either. No. My words were filled with rage. I remember being a strange sixteen year old, all too clearly.

The children were trained by adults. Trained toward hatred. Trained toward violence. Their fists struck, powered by the voices of their parents, their teachers, and the hatred spewing from their phones.

It was expected, wasn’t it? To gang up against the different one? The one who dressed like a budding dandy, who called themselves Nex, and whose friends knew them as he or they, him or them. Especially when Nex had the temerity to defend himself.

No ambulance was called by the school.

Nex died for no reason other than: some adults cannot allow anyone who looks, or acts, or feels differently than they do to live…

And I went on, stating facts, and asking questions:

They manipulate us into thinking that someone else is the real problem, the real danger, the real threat. Someone like Nex, who tried to defend himself, and whose soft body fell to the bathroom floor. Someone like a parent at the southern border, worried that their kids won’t make it through the night.

 All we have is each other. What are you doing about it? How will you choose to help?

If you’d like to read the whole essay, I’d be honored. It’s a short one. You can read it on my website: For Nex Benedict.

Thanks again. And keep breathing.

best wishes — Thorn

I finally figured out how to get a comments section here. You’ll have to log in on beehiiv, but public comments are back! I look forward to reading your thoughts. And thanks to everyone who has been emailing their comments in the absence of the public forum.