When Will You Come Out Of The Closet And Help Yourself Or Others?

Human life carries a worth beyond price, yet plenty of people would rather we keep our own light dim so theirs can seem brighter by comparison. At what point do you decide to step out and stop letting them do that to you? We talk about how much it changes a gay person's life to come out. The same holds for anyone who finally lets the world see who they really are.

Pushing a belief onto someone else through pressure or coercion spreads neither love nor understanding. Each of us carries something worth offering. And too often that offering gets smothered because another person, afraid of what a different viewpoint might do to theirs, insists we fall in line with what they already think.

My own conviction is that every one of us has something to give, provided we trust ourselves first. That goes for the person with the most severe developmental disability right up through the sharpest, most articulate mind in the room. So why, the moment we gather in a group, do we start sizing ourselves up against everyone around us? Some get pushed to the margins. A few get lifted into leadership over the rest. Picture the student who sits silent in a classroom, certain there is nothing worth saying. People can be criticized and complained about so relentlessly that they simply close their mouths, afraid of being the next target.

Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross paid attention to the so-called little people whom most of us walk right past. Think of the cleaning woman whose quiet entrance into a hospital room settles and comforts a dying patient, without a word spoken. Or Pope Francis, the one they call Father, who set aside the pomp of the office and in doing so unsettled the cardinals and clergy in the Vatican who were used to placing themselves well above ordinary believers.

We watch what others do to people who speak up, and the watching makes us hesitant to speak at all. Psychology has a name for this. Relational aggression, as opposed to direct aggression, where the harm is physical. Shutting a person out and recruiting others to shut them out too can turn deadly, sometimes ending in suicide, sometimes in the murder of innocent strangers. Have you ever been sure your opinion matched or beat the one everybody deferred to, or that your gut call would have landed better than the choice that actually got made, and still said nothing? The world gains very little when its decent people hold their tongues.

Every one of us is a rough diamond. The brilliance is already there; it only waits on the cutting and polishing. That process scares some people. Others just lack the confidence to begin. Suppose Gandhi had said nothing. Suppose Mother Teresa had settled for being an unremarkable nun. She might have had an easier, calmer life for it. When Kubler-Ross spoke out against quarantining and casting off children with AIDS, children who had done nothing to deserve it, the community she wanted to shelter them in all but threw her out.

How many times have you sat in a group with your mouth shut, voicing none of what half the room was probably thinking too? It applies to standing up for gay people's right to live ordinary lives without being rejected or hounded. Have you stayed quiet while someone in the room worked to deny that, or something like it? I am not trying to strip anyone of the right to disapprove of homosexuality, any more than I would surrender my own right to approve of it, or at the very least to not reject it. Everyone holds rights, and we have to guard against trampling someone else's while we press for our own. Then again, have you ever defended another person's rights out loud while going silent about your right to your own beliefs?

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