Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Hiroko Kawano
I wanted to start by saying that a guiding priciple for my life
is that I trully want to make the world more comfortable for everyone.
And I know what it's like to be uncomfortable.
When I was 11 years old
and realized that there was something not quite right with me
in the eyes of other people,
that I was attracted to other boys,
and particularly attracted to a man,
to Dr. Kildare -
Richard Chamberlain, for those of you who are more towards my age -
(Laughter)
it was really scary.
And I lived the next years of my life, until I was into my twenties,
really being frightened,
scared,
in a panic.
I didn't get good grades in school.
I barely got through college.
It took its toll on me.
It was really scarring.
And it wasn't necessarily the kids in the schoolyard that bullied me.
It was just knowing that I was a sinner and broken in the eyes of God -
at least, that's what I thought.
So I know what it's like to be uncomfortable.
And I've made a big part of my life making people's lives comfortable,
whether it's buying our furniture -
And I take it very seriously.
Bob and I take it really seriously to make comfortable furniture.
And the other big part of my life is to end the kind of bullying
that has such an enormous effect on innocent, vulnerable kids.
And as I've been on that journey,
I've realized that bullying is far greater than what just happens to LGBT kids,
although so serious.
[BULLY]
You know, the definition of "bully" has changed over the years.
It used to have a positive connotation.
"They have a nice new cafeteria at the college."
"Well, bully for the kids here. They've got a nice, good cafeteria."
It used to be a positive word, and it's evolved and changed over time.
Today, when you ask people about a bully,
they often think right away about the schoolyard bully
or the neighborhood bully.
But what I want to do today is explore the evolution of this term,
and maybe today we can redefine it a little bit
and finesse it
and make it so that bullying in all the parts of our society ends.
But I want to ask this question first:
how many in this audience have been bullied
at some point of your life?
That's an easy question.
How many of you have bullied somebody else?
Several years ago, I had an extraordinary coincidence.
I grew up about 600 miles from here, in Trenton, New Jersey -
Ewing, New Jersey.
And a gal who I went to elementary, junior high and high school with,
she moved down here about the same time that I did.
And she contacted me because, actually, I was speaking at the school
when I came out with my book, "Youth in Crisis."
And when I knew her in school, she was like the straight-A student.
She was the goody two shoes. She kind of dressed pretty but plain.
She wasn't one of the hip kids, if you will.
So, I was part of that more hip bunch and troublesome bunch
and always in mischief of some kind.
So when she contacted me to get together with her,
I was a little reluctant because I didn't know that much about her really.
And then, when I did a little bit of research,
I found out that she was married to a Southern Baptist minister.
So that was like a red flag, and I thought,
"What am I really going to have in common,
and what does she really want to talk to me about?"
But being a little bit of an adventurer, I went and met with her.
And we sat at the Starbucks,
and she told me that she admired the work that I was doing,
that she loved the advocacy work that I was doing,
and started telling me about friends of hers
and telling me about how she divorced her husband
and how she's had a very different attitude
than what her church brought her up to believe.
And it was great.
And then, she looked at me and said -
I even get the clamp thinking about this -
She said, "You know, when we were in school, you bullied me.
And gosh, a chill just went through me.
I mean, I think of myself as a good person.
I want to be a good person. I don't want to hurt people.
And she then started to tell me
about how, when we were young, I would tease her and bully her.
And it really went through me, and I said,
"I have to be much more conscious of what I do,
how I act towards people,
whether it's employees in my company or people that I meet on the outside,
whatever it is."
But it made me think that so many of us have bullied other people
and don't know about it.
There's the overt bullying of the schoolyard bully,
and there's the covert bullying that many of us might do.
Webster defines "bully"
as a blustering, browbeating person,
especially one who is habitually cruel,
insulting or threatening
to others who are weaker, smaller or in some way vulnerable.
Let's talk about poor people in our society.
Would believe America, the greatest country in the world -
as so many say -
has 40 million people living in poverty,
and 15 million of that is kids?
Think about what poverty is like.
You're hungry, you don't have enough food -
Yes, there are people without enough food!
And yet, there are legislators who want to cut food stamp programs
because a few people might take advantage of it.
Or they might want to cut the school lunch program
because a few kids might take advantage of it.
And by the way, these people that want to cut these things
because they're so pious that people are taking advantage of something,
it's like Congress and Senate doesn't take advantage of anything
and abuse a privilege that they might have.
Gosh!
But I think about people who are hungry.
I mean, my God,
if I don't eat a meal when I have to eat a meal -
And I will tell you about Bob Williams:
if he doesn't eat a meal when he needs to -
Everybody in the company knows: always feed Bob.
Because it makes you cranky.
It's really hard to concentrate when you're hungry.
When I was a kid and I was bad, I remember my parents:
they would punish me by sending me to my room without dinner,
and it was like torture.
I heard a professor from UNC, Chapel Hill, speak a few weeks ago -
I'm privileged to be on Governor Cooper's Business Council -
and this professor spoke about the poverty in our state
and in our country.
And he told a story about how he went to a school
and he asked all the kids what they had for dinner the night before
because he wanted to know who ate and who didn't.
And this one little girl said, "It wasn't my turn to eat."
Can you imagine that? In this country!
In this country where people say, "It is the greatest country in the world,"
and we have kids that don't have a meal at night because it's not their turn?
Shame on these people.
How do you lift yourself our of poverty?
Education.
You have to get some education to get a better job.
I think the statistic is
if a person does not have a 3rd or 4th-grade education,
they are 70% more likely to end up incarcerated.
That's stupid.
Talk about uneducated.
That's uneducated on the part of people
that would allow anybody not to have a 3rd or 4th-grade education.
We can keep so many people out of jail just by that nature.
But by the way, for-profit prisons? One of the dumbest ideas ever.
So -
(Applause)
So, you know, when I hear legislators talk about tax reform,
in my mind, the word "reform" means to improve something.
But to have tax reform
where you're cutting education and cutting food programs for poor people,
that's not tax reform.
Where you're giving tax credits to wealthy people
in the belief that they are going to spend more money
and that will generate more jobs and income in society?
Well, that's been proven wrong!
That's not even a question anymore.
It's been proven so wrong.
So why would we continue doing that?
And my contention is that the legislators who do this to poor people,
that perpetuate poverty,
they are bullies,
and we should call them out for what they are.
They are using their powerful position to denigrate and keep down other people,
and we should call them out for it.
I pay taxes
because I want to be part of society and I want a better society.
I want more people to be educated.
I want more people to be fed and be productive.
I want more people to buy more furniture.
And you only get it with people that get into the middle class
and get to the upper class.
We shouldn't have a poverty class
in this "the greatest country in the world."
I would also contend
that the people that initiate and perpetuate this kind of legislation -
I would contend that they perpetuate systemic racism.
And for anybody who believes
that there is not systemic racism in this country,
I would ask you to think again.
Do some research.
This is not just an idle claim
by somebody who kneels down at a football game.
This is a really serious part of our society.
I admire people who kneel and pray for a better country,
where we take better care of our people
and eliminate the kind of systemic racism that we have.
I had dinner just this past week with a friend in New York,
an about 35-year-old guy, African-American,
and in the course of dinner, and preparing for this, I said to him,
"Mark, do you think there's systemic racism in this country?
Do you face it?"
He almost spit out his food, laughing!
He looked at me and said, "Are you kidding me?"
I said, "No! This is a serious question!"
He said, "You have to be kidding! Yes, there absolutely is!"
And it really made understand even that much deeper than I already understood
that I don't know the systemic racism that exists in this country
because I don't walk in his shoes.
I'm not profiled, like he told me about,
whether it's being stopped in a small town
as he's driving cross-country with his husband
or if he's at the airport.
In my opinion, these people are bullies.
And they're cruel, make no mistake about it.
Keeping a kid hungry is cruel.
Kids.Wordsmyth,
a University of Cambridge publication,
defines "bully" as someone who harasses and frightens others.
And you know, I left this in about how they use it in a sentence
because virtually every dictionary talked about bullies in school
and bullies in the neighborhood.
A great deal of the talk of bullying does surround LGBT kids.
You hear about it all the time,
and a lot of the statistics come in
and it's about LGBT kids and how they're treated.
There's not that much of the other research.
So let's talk about some alarming numbers.
28% of US students in grades 6 through 12 have experienced bullying.
15% of high school students
were electronically bullied in the past year.
You know, if those numbers were 2%,
would you agree with me that that would be terrible?
But one-quarter of kids have experienced bullying
and 15% were cyberbullied.
I think 0% is the number.
15% of LGBT kids have experienced cyberbullying.
Not 15% -
55%.
You know, I wonder, who breeds the bullies?
How does a kid grow up and become a bully?
What kind of home did they grow up in? What kind of education did they have?
What church did they go to that would enable them to become a bully?
30% of young people admit to bullying others,
and 41% witness bullying once a week or more.
70% of young people and school staff
admit they have seen and witnessed bullying in their schools.
You know, we see all of this, and it's always about schools,
those "terrible teachers,"
you know, "those teachers that don't care," and all of that.
It's more of this systemic keeping down of education in this country.
If I hear one more politician talk about teachers in a negative way -
forget the fact that my mother was a teacher
and I know how hard she worked as a teacher -
but I think it's so ridiculous and it's bullying.
[BULLYING = DISEASE]
But you know, all this statistics about bullying at school
really makes me think and reminds me that bullying is a disease.
And I want to talk for a minute about the covert bullying.
What makes an 11-year-old kid
come home after being bullied at school for being gay
and walk in the closet and hang himself?
What makes the 13-year-old kid that I met with several years ago,
who's now, I believe, a senior in high school,
who had tried to take his life twice -
not once, twice; 13 years old -
innocent, precious kid ...
As I sat across from him, at Starbucks again,
I said, "Why would you try to take your life?"
And he looked at me and said,
"Because I'm a sinner. Because I'm broken."
And I'm like, "Oh, please, don't ever say that again.
Don't ever think that again.
Where did you hear that?"
"In my daddy's church."
I said, "For every minister that tells you that,
I will find you 10 that will tell you it's not."
And that's one of the big things that I really want to get across today.
For New Year's last year, I made a resolution,
and it was that every opportunity I get
to talk about and educate people about the incredible harm
that comes from this toxic teaching that homosexuality is a sin,
I'm going to take advantage of that opportunity.
I'm here today,
I've done it with the school board in Alexander County.
The County Commissioners in Alexander County
asked me to come and talk about business and what growth plans we had,
and they also heard my discussion about that it's not a sin.
And -
And my birthday wish
is that it won't be a sin anymore.
I really believe that if we don't talk about these things,
nobody will ever know it.
Bullying is a disease that has permeated so much of our society -
Whether it's poor people, gay kids, whatever it is,
it has such an impact on mental health,
on physical health,
on crime ...
It leads to death.
So the thing I want to ask you all to do is to consider -
And I always ask people to sit,
so today I want to ask you to take a stand
and to take a pledge.
The Tyler Clementi Foundation was started by his parents
after he was cyberbullied in the second week at Rutgers University,
drove to the George Washington Bridge and jumped off and took his life.
It didn't destroy his family,
but it didn't help them.
It really created chaos in these beautiful, wonderful people's lives.
And they've taken the pain that they've gone through
and they've moved it forward
to put out the most beautiful pledge that you can see for all kinds of people
to stop bullying.
And I would ask you to take that pledge.
You can google "upstander pledge,"
and ask yourself, in everything that you do,
if you are being complicit with these politicians that bully
and other people that bully.
Whether it's in your family, at your church, at your synagogue,
wherever it is in life,
let's end bullying.
Thank you.
(Applause)