As you likely heard by now, a young man who was a talented violinist with all kinds of promise and had everything going for him had killed himself. He was a freshman at my alma mater Rutgers University.
He died because two people, one of them being his roommate, had videotaped him with another man and posted it on the internet. The young man couldn't stand the idea of the whole world knowing who he really was and jumped off the George Washington bridge.
I was fortunate during my time at Rutgers, because I got in later in life, to get special housing that afforded me my own room so that I could avoid the roommate drama. But sadly, I've not been a stranger to bullying. As I was trying to figure out my own sexual orientation and gender identity as a teen, I was being bullied for being "weird" and socially stunted. The lasting impact of that would be suffering from social disorders and depression. They say words don't matter. But they do.
I was teased, sexually harassed, and at times students have done me physical injury (such as the time my left pinky was broken when one of the girls bullying me violently grabbed a basketball from my hands).
Bullying is a plague on this society, and we need to begin to seriously address it, as Tyler Clementi was not the only unfortunate victim of bullying that led to suicide. Kids who are younger than he is are suffering the same fate everyday, many of them LGBT. "Kids will be kids" is not a legitimate excuse, nor is "Bullying has been around forever and is never gonna end". It's all a cop-out saying that people don't want to be bothered with teaching kids how to respect your fellow human beings from an early age, especially as we live in an age where bullying is not just merely limited to the real world anymore and can happen online as well. It doesn't matter the reason why the bully is bullying. It needs to end, with the involvement of parents, students, teachers, and even the authorities, if necessary.
(As a note, it is interesting, as I was writing this, I got a Rutgers Alumni letter in the email saying how devoted to diversity Rutgers is to their students and the community.)