Reflections on Ryan White
Taking a break from writing about music and the creative process to talk about Ryan White. But, what is art other than communicating ideas and emotions through storytelling? And Ryan… what a story.
Ryan’s story has always been incredibly personal to me. I grew up 100 miles from Ryan in Indiana. He was a little older than me, but he was just another kid from Indiana like I was. I had just turned ten when he died and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a disease, no matter how dangerous it appeared, or how scary people made it out to be, could make people be so evil to other people. Especially a kid.
Then thirty years later COVID happened, and I was reminded all over again. People’s fear drove them to unspeakable evils in the name of “safety”. Humans don’t learn, they don’t change. No amount of facts or data will make people act differently. Their hearts have to be turned.
Ryan helped change hearts.
What first attracted people to Ryan’s story was that he was a kid. A hemophiliac, not a homosexual or a drug user. But what made Ryan who he was wasn’t his age, but his spirit and his character. He acted like the adult when the adults were acting like petulant children. He acted like a Christian when churchgoers acted like Judas. He set an example that, unfortunately, people admire but don’t have the ability or willingness to emulate, even under the smallest of circumstances. Elton John summed Ryan up very well in this short clip with Anderson Cooper a few years back.
In spite of everything being political these days, this is not political. This is human. How do we treat each other? We live in a world where people write articles about not letting their parents see their kids anymore because of who they voted for. A world where we tell people we hope their mother dies from COVID because they’re not wearing a mask in a parking lot. A world where people SWAT people for beating them at a video game.
Why is this not political? Because it pre-dates Democrats and Republicans. It pre-dates America. It pre-dates the discovery of America. For that matter, it pre-dates the arrival of Native Americans to the continent. Just because they couldn’t do it on social media doesn’t mean they didn’t do it. And, mark my words, in thirty-five years we’ll do it again with whatever disease it is then that we’ve never seen before.
I accept all of this as reality but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Nor, does it mean I have to be quiet about it. See, the crazy mob who wanted to keep Ryan out of school, we can view them in hindsight as bad people, but they thought they were doing the right thing. That’s what Ryan said to his mom. He told her, “They’re just trying to protect their kids like you’re trying to protect me.” See, he had more respect and compassion for the people calling him a fag every day that most of us have for our neighbors today. Ryan, on the other hand, was actually fighting for what was right. But as much as we like to think we know we’re “on the right side of history” or some other nonsense, very few people actually know they’re on the right side of history. More often than not, people are just trying to create the history they want to see, rather than making predictions about what time will eventually tell.
It doesn’t matter how you vote, what your religious views are, where you live, the color of your skin, any of the things we obsess about these days: people are assholes. There is no group, whether selected by biology or otherwise, that is exempt from this. In fact, I will go so far as to say, every single person is an asshole. The only variable is how often you’re an asshole.
What’s the lesson here? The lesson is to not just admire Ryan, but to act more like him. See the humanity in the “other”. Understand, that while you may think they’re wrong, they’re probably just acting on their convictions like you’re acting on yours. And the best way to change their mind is to change their heart. And you don’t do that by calling them names, or making threats or any other such assholery…
You do it by loving them.
The Ryan White Story is on Netflix as of the publishing of this blog post. I suggest you watch it if you’re not familiar with the story.