I have the fundraiser for Josiah link in my signature. Let's boost it while his family is sorting things out & see what else we can do to help. I think it's the least we can do. TK is of course the responsible person, but our online behavior in this thread has been pretty fucked. I know I slipped into a teenage mindset & made fun out of TK's spiral. None of us conspired what he ended up doing, but I am personally disappointed in myself for how I viewed what's now the inevitable. Online behavior like this eventually reaches the person struggling, & I can only imagine all the jokes we routinely made reached TK and made his situation that much worse. Who knows how things would've turned out if this sort of spectacle never happened on here. SLAP is a critical forum for skate gossip.
I don't want to guilt-trip anyone and I am sorry if I am doing that despite my caution. I really don't know of an eloquent way to put all this. There's so many threads that have made a big joke out of people going through some really dark shit. Many PALS have said this long before me. I should've known better. This shit was hilarious to me and now I am ashamed. A kid's life is cut short.
I'm sorry to make a very dark moment that much darker, but I want to do what I can to see that this doesn't happen again on SLAP. I'm not online too often these days, but I'll do what I can to confront a dangerous thread when it starts. Perhaps some of you feel the same & I think that would be awesome. Maybe we can learn from this as a bunch of internet geeks & say 'no, let's not make a spectacle out of shit like this.' And the threads can get locked or deleted before they even start to grow.
So I'm sorry this is very longwinded, but let's keep passing around the fundraiser link & do our best to stop the online schadenfreude that happened in this thread.