Lessons ‘they’ learned help ‘us’

Matthew Shepard was killed in Laramie, Wyo., in 1997. The slaying was a hate crime.

Shepard, a university student, was beaten, tied to a fence on the prairie and abandoned to die, which he did after six days. The two men who attacked him were tried, convicted of murder and sent to prison.

A month or two after the slaying, Moises Kaufman and other members of the Teutonic Theater Project in New York City traveled to Laramie for the first of six visits. They interviewed hundreds of residents of Laramie and asked them how they felt about what happened.

Kaufman and the theater group then constructed a play about the town’s reaction to the event.

The question is, why should you or I go see "The Laramie Project"? It’s a miserable subject, covering a gruesome killing. And frankly, I’ve really had my fill of gruesome murders, between Opel and Gary.

You and I, we’d never go out and murder somebody. What does this horrible act committed in the name of prejudice have to do with ordinary folks like us?

This is something that happened to those people over in Laramie, not to us. What can we possibly learn from this?

I don’t say that tongue-in-cheek. I think when someone conducts 200 interviews in a town and bothers to produce it as a play, they are asking a question of significance.

If you look deep into any person, you will find someone who has experienced exclusion. I’m concerned that while we recognize overt prejudice, we are slower to grasp the subtle ways exclusion breeds and spreads. It’s like an odorless, tasteless gas that can be hard to detect or — in my case — hard to admit.

I had a painful awakening when I became a stepmother and suddenly found myself reclassified as a "them" inside my family.

It wasn’t just finding my status as a less-than, it was the agonizing realization that I treated my own stepmother this very same way. She and her blood kin were the "thems"; I and my blood kin were the "us."

It wasn’t a Hatfield and McCoy situation, but there was a concept in my head, which was present at family gatherings, that my stepmother wasn’t real family. She was a them inside our own family.

Dreadful, just to sit and conjure up what that meant. And I didn’t see the odorless vapors until I became a stepmother myself.

I had another experience that also crept up on me and caught me by surprise. When I married a person outside my religious faith, I was stunned to learn that I could not have a religious marriage ceremony within my faith.

The simplest way to say this is that because I was marrying one of "them," I couldn’t have a ceremony by "us." Suddenly I found myself as a "neither."

My religion, which I grew up in and felt connected to and still feel connected to, was telling me that my status was changing and I wasn’t quite in anymore. I had become a "them."

There are big things at stake when we believe we are anointed with special powers to gate-keep who is in and who is out. Who can marry and who cannot.

It’s scary to realize that once you are cast as an outsider, your status drops and can plummet to worthlessness. Your very life can be considered worthless in the eyes of someone else. And now you are vulnerable to attack.

Again and again we have seen vicious attacks on "them" in places such as Germany, Bosnia and Montgomery, Ala.

And Laramie, Wyo. That is why I am so concerned when I hear a world leader describe people as "us" or "them."

I think we are accountable for what happened in Laramie. Prejudice grows like a wild weed everywhere. We need to wrestle with what makes us comfortable, where we draw lines, who we include and who we don’t. We need to hear what the people of Laramie learned and think about what it means to "us."

Sarri Gilman, a licensed therapist, has founded two local nonprofit organizations to support children and teens who have been homeless. She is a mother, wife and songwriter. Her column on living with purpose and meaning runs every other Tuesday. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.

"The Laramie Project" plays at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 29 at the Everett Theatre, 2911 Colby Ave., Everett. Tickets are $7 to $14 at the box office; call 425-258-6766 or visit www.everetttheatre.org.

Bern Haggerty, an attorney and co-author of a hate crimes ordinance in Laramie, Wyo., will moderate audience discussions after the performances on Friday and Feb. 29.

Ticket proceeds from Feb. 22 will be donated to the Interfaith Association of Snohomish County’s Dignity and Diversity Programming for its schools programs on multicultural awareness, respect and individual responsibility. For more information, call 425-252-6672.