Little Squirrels Can Climb Tall Trees, Michael Murphy [best books to read for self development .txt] 📗

intended to do his best to ignore the whole thing. He’d even go so far as to pretend he had an emergency at the hospital that at least required his leaving the room to take a call if that became necessary.

When the speaker took the stage after suitable gushing introductions, Kyle looked around the room to try to study the group, or at least their attention to the speaker. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone seemed to be paying rapt attention to the man on the stage. When Kyle looked up next after momentarily zoning out, he saw the speaker holding a microphone and strutting back and forth on the stage like some prize rooster at the county fair.

Kyle’s wandering attention was snapped back to the present when he heard the man on stage speak of “the sin of homosexuality.” To Kyle’s utter and absolute horror, the man proceeded to strut and rant and babble about one misconception after another about being gay. Kyle was simultaneously appalled and infuriated.

The more the man on stage talked, the angrier Kyle became, but he didn’t have a clue what to do. He didn’t want to embarrass his mother in front of her peers, her friends, but he was close to spitting with anger as the man continued to speak. As Kyle silently fumed, he ran through everything he would like to do to the man for the hatred he was spewing, for all the harm he was doing to innocent people, for all the lies he was spouting.

After about thirty minutes of haranguing the audience, the speaker concluded and ordered the lights in the room raised. He called attention to microphones around the room and invited the good Christian women in attendance to come up and ask him questions—all, it turned out, a part of his effort to promote some new book he had just published.

Kyle couldn’t take it anymore after the third woman spoke in praise of the man’s remarks. Without planning his move, Kyle found himself standing from the table and walking to the nearest microphone. When he was recognized, Kyle stared at the man, leaned down to adjust the microphone to his height, and spoke calmly to the man on the stage.

“I am a doctor here in New York. I want to take just a moment of your time tonight to tell you about one of the patients that came into my ER today. It was a young man. I learned later that he was just eighteen. He was so badly injured that we couldn’t save him—he died. He’d been beaten. Beaten to death, as it turned out. For one reason: he was gay. He’d been walking down the street holding another man’s hand when someone, some stranger, decided to make himself judge, jury, and executioner—just like you’ve been doing here tonight.”

Kyle proceeded to describe in detail all of the injuries the young man had suffered when his attackers had taken a baseball bat to his head, fracturing his skull, among other things. The room was so silent while Kyle spoke that it seemed as if time had simply stopped. All of the servers who had been moving through the room pouring water and removing dishes stopped what they were doing. All of the diners stopped. Every eye in the room was on Kyle. Everyone could tell that something big was happening, even if they couldn’t define what the “something” was.

Kyle didn’t rant. He didn’t rave. He didn’t shout. He didn’t wave his hands. Instead he calmly and methodically described what he had confronted when the young man had been wheeled into the ER. Several women gasped as Kyle described how the young man’s skull had been crushed from repeated blows with a baseball bat. Kyle was actually surprised that the man on the stage was silent. When he looked up at one point, he saw that the little weasel on the stage was nearly turning white with panic at how this whole thing was turning out.

Turning his attention more to the women in the audience, Kyle continued. “I just simply wanted all of you to know that you may all rant and rave about the horrors of homosexuality—even though most of your facts are just dead wrong—but you all need to realize that you’re not talking about a concept. You’re talking about real people. You’re talking about some mother’s son. You’re talking about someone’s brother. You’re talking about someone’s sister. You’re talking about people that have names, lives, identities.

“Nearly every gay person is born into a straight family, born of straight parents, raised in a straight household. No one recruits anyone or leads anyone into a life of sin. As a wise woman has said, ‘I was born this way.’ Some people are born with blue eyes. Some people are born with black hair. Some people are born tall. And some people are born gay. It just is—so get over it.

“Words like I’ve heard here tonight do nothing except incite more incidents that hurt more innocent people. You all proclaim to follow Christ, a man of peace and love, but all I’ve heard here tonight is hatred and lies. If Christ were here tonight, he’d hang his head in shame at what’s being carried out in his name by those who profess to follow him. Thank you.”

As he stepped away from the microphone, Kyle intended to leave the room and walk around before returning to say good night to his mother. He assumed that his little speech had made him into persona non grata with his previous fellow diners. He was quite surprised to hear a scattering of applause from around the room. Many of the people present didn’t know whether they should applaud or boo. They couldn’t separate out the parts of the message into neat little boxes, which was the very point Kyle had tried to make.

The man on the stage was trying to regain control of the audience but was interrupted by someone else approaching a microphone. “Excuse