CHSExVIHS

(18) Dear Society

Hey everybody. Ruby here. This'll be just a smol chapter to celebrate the launching of EGDOM's Facebook page, "Dear Society."

We came up with the idea of Dear Society on September 29 2017, after one of Aila's friends died by a drug overdose. The newspapers which reported the incident were saying all kinds of dramatized (untrue) shit to catch the attention of the public. That sort of fucked-up journalism was hurting Aila, and her friend's family.

And this wasn't the first time our local newspapers went about casually breaking the journalism code of conduct. Whenever suicides happen around here, newspapers tend to overly glamorize them and flesh out stories including all the gory details about the method of suicide. Being suicide attempt survivors, Scarlett and I get ... really hurt when we hear those news stories -- and I'm pretty sure it hurts a lot of other people who're in the same situation too.

So, yes -- EGDOM was done putting up with the media's bullshit. We wanted to publicly call the newspapers out for being so unprofessional, but we really couldn't. Ours is a town where gangs have a lot of power over the citizens -- plus, rich people tend to hire thugs to do their dirty work. Raising our voices against injustice would mean we'd get "silenced" and usually in a very violent way.

And that's how we came up with the idea of a Facebook page to tell society exactly what we thought of its fucked-up system. Yes, it still ain't safe for a small group of teenagers to attack something so huge -- but atleast we'd be anonymous, and that counts for something.

All EGDOM came up with a list of topics we wanted to talk about. Everybody contributed; we do this as a team. Ian isn't an admin of the page but along with everyone else, he volunteered to proofread and contribute points.

Nella pointed out that if we wanted to make an impact on society, we had to start small and then gradually make our way to the top. This meant we'd have to start with talking about small topics -- like bringing the public's attention to the ever-escalating smoking problem -- and then end it with talking about sensitive and controversial topics; the shit we actually wanted to talk about.

Scarlett was the one who had the honor of creating the page: she drew the artwork for the profile picture, and was the photographer for our bombass cover picture.

It took us nearly a month after that to come up with the first entry for the page, because we were busy with exams and didn't have time for to work on either CHSExVIHS or Dear Society. Our first post on the page was published on October 19 2017, and I'm honored to be the one who initiated the work on the page. I wrote something very, very harmless -- just a little something motivating everyone to do their best for the upcoming exams. It's something spreading positivity, wildly contrasting our original intentions for the page, but hey -- start small, right?

Like Aila said, EGDOM might just make history one day. But until then -- until we destroy the current system of our country from the inside, all we can do is keep being social justice bloggers.