Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Hope

Perhaps there is some hope for our species after all. After hearing about doctors being killed in the name of saving lives, rights being taken away because of a book most of its followers have never read, and education being stripped to the bone so that we can keep buying our big screen TV's, it's nice to see people -- a lot, apparently -- and companies doing the right thing.

This story didn't start out that way, of course. A couple of DJ's, on radio station KRXQ in Sacramento, thought they would be funny and used their morning show airtime to make fun of transgendered kids. Okay, so that's the sort of thing they always do and it's sad that, even today, there are people who find such base, crude humor to be funny. Still, if that had been all there was too it, I suspect people would have shook their heads, muttered something about rednecks and trailer trash, and gone on their way. But it didn't stop there.

The DJ's also advocated calling transgendered kids names like "freak" and "idiot" and even went so far as to suggest physical violence would be appropriate. "I look forward," says Arnie States of the Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning show, "to when they go out into society and society beats them down. And they end up in therapy." Or, as Michael Rowe of the Huffington Post wrote, "dead."

The radio hosts and even the station manager were, at first, unapologetic. Station Manager Jim Fox said "Did they do anything wrong? If you’re a regular listener, the answer is no." So you would think it wouldn't go much further than that. After all, transgendered kids make up a pretty small minority and most people, I suspect, don't really understand them. Certainly, they're not a group that has seen much support in the past outside the LGBT community.

And yet, it didn't end there. People wrote to the station and the company that owns it. People passed the word around via twitter. Not just LGBT people, either -- people of all walks and orientations. Because child abuse is, no matter what the circumstances, abhorrent. Mainstream news media picked up the story, too. And something even more amazing happened; big corporations took notice and acted. At least a dozen companies pulled their advertising from the station. Companies like AT&T and Verizon. Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Chipotle, Sonic, and McDonald's.

Whether or not it was their corporate conscience or the conscience of their customer base that made them do it, it's an impressive and positive sign.

Earlier this week, the Radio Station placed a notice on their website, preempting their main page saying "We have failed you. As a show, as people, as broadcasters, we have simply failed on almost every level." The show has been off the air ever since and will return tomorrow (Thursday, June 11, 2009) with a discussion of the subject. They have invited people from the TG community to join them so that they can learn from their mistake and, hopefully, educate others. As much a pessimist as I am, I still have hope that they have truly had a change of heart and are open to learning what it means to be transgender and are not just kowtowing to pressure from advertisers.

So we have the general public sticking up for a minority group they're largely unacquainted with, corporations refusing to do business with people who promote child abuse, and boors willing to learn.

Perhaps there may come a time when individuals and corporations both do the right thing all the time. Perhaps there is hope for us after all.