Tagged and Bagged

Emile Durkheim once said that living in a society means that norms, structures and rules need to be followed.  This is supposedly done to keep order within society and to make sure to safeguard the interests of the citizens.  In reality, labelling is just used to satisfy society's need to control the behaviour of its citizens.  This means that those people who stray away from the conventional norms are tagged and labelled as deviant.  The simple act of dyeing your hair or wearing clothes which are different from the fashion at the time is shunned upon.



Kurt Cassar



All sort of names have been invented to define people and categorise them.  Putting people in groups seems to be a new found hobby.  Short, tall, male, female, straight, gay, religious, non religious, intelligent, stupid, emo, punk, nerd, black, white, fat, skinny, freak, weirdo, four eyed are amongst the many labels found around.  Somehow it seems that people feel comfortable labelling people because through it they get the impresson that they get to know everything about a person.  Obviously, this is far from the truth.

Who of us can say that they've never been labelled as one thing or another, and felt hurt about it because people saw them just as that label, nothing else, never even bothering to look beyond that, to dig deeper and get to know them.  Who they are? What they like? What they can do? However, this doesn't seem to stop people from doing the same things to others.  Somehow, instead of standing up, helping others and fighting this labelling culture, people seem to take pleasure in actually seeing people suffer as much as they did, as if by doing this, they are taking some sort of revenge, having the power to crush others, attempting to crawl back to the topo of the ladder.

PEOPLE USED AS PERSONAL PUNCHING BAGS FOR OUR OWN PLEASURE,

FOR OUR OWN SENS OF SELF-WORTH.

Words are very powerful and people need to start realizing just how much power they have when they speak.  Words can be used to give hope, to encourage and to support people.  Otherwise they can be used to shred away people's decency, leading people to despair.  It is not the first time that we hear of incidents where people just couldn't cope anymore and they decided to succumb to suicide, the pain being so great that they just can't imagine living one more day.  Suicide is in fact on the increase, especially with teenagers.  In 2006 in the USA, suicide has claimed the lives of over 33,000 people, making it the 11th leading cause of death.

At the end of the day, the choice is in our hands.  We can decide to use our words to make some positive difference in people's lives or else we can throw them at people like rocks, until we stone them to death.