cry baby don't dig squares

When I die, I will kill you.

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste.”

Barry Crimmins died yesterday, a little over a month after revealing to people he had cancer. He was 64 and I’m willing to bet you never heard of him before today. It’s okay. I’d never heard of him either until a couple of years ago when I watched the documentary about his life, “Call Me Lucky”. My first reaction after the movie was over was anger, anger over that I had gone so much of my life without ever even hearing the name of such a good, brave, and heroic individual who so continually and consistently spoke out against injustice and evil in every form while being funny the entire time.

If you want to learn more about Barry Crimmins in a hurry then watching “Call Me Lucky” is your best bet, which is on Netflix and all the usual places. But if you can’t, Barry was a stand-up comic with a long history of encouraging other comics, helping them get their start, and even fighting for comics to get fair pay, founding a couple of comedy clubs in Boston along the way. A lot of major comics, producers, and directors credit Barry’s encouragement and assistance for their success to this day.

But that was far from the only thing Barry Crimmins did. In 1995, Barry Crimmins testified in front of the US Congress that AOL, who was the lead internet provider at the time, were complicit with predators exchanging child pornography and using their service to seek children to victimize. Sitting across from AOL’s supposed director of government affairs, Barry continually and without hesitation demanded their company immediately adopt a zero-tolerance policy on pedophilia and refused to entertain any of this pitiful’s crony’s excuses for why they had ignored his every attempt to warn them of the sick criminals constantly using their service. Today, where there are PSA’s warning kids about the dangers of giving out personal information online, this might not sound like such a bold stand. But the internet in the 1990′s was a very new thing, and a lot of people didn’t use it at all, and even less understand the possible risks of using it. To give you an idea of the mindset, I remember just filling out my AOL profile out of habit when I signed up in the 90′s, including putting in my home address and phone number, which would then be publically visible to anyone who knew my username. Fortunately, my mother wisely told me to erase that info as soon as possible, but there were a lot of other kids not so fortunate. Barry Crimmins was one such kid, and long before the internet existed at all. For a large portion of his life, he had kept secret even from a lot of his closest friends that was a survivor of sexual abuse as a child. Seeking support groups for survivors of abuse on AOL in the early 90′s accidentally brought Barry to a group of people seeking to commit the very acts that had so traumatized him as a child.

After no action was taken by the police as there were no laws pertaining to internet predation then, Barry eventually managed to be heard by Congress, who in response enacted the first of many laws criminalizing pedophilia and child pornography on the internet. And after opening up about his horrible experience continued to lend his ear to other survivors while using his voice to loudly and publically condemn victimizers as he had always done.

This is just a fraction of this man’s life and my words don’t do him justice. After watching “Call Me Lucky” I started to see Barry Crimmins as a personal hero. He was someone deeply empathetic and caring for those in need while simultaneously savage and unyielding against all those who commit or make excuses for the needless harm constantly inflicted upon the world, a combination that’s all too rare.

I was deeply saddened by the news of his death this morning and even a little frustrated that most people probably won’t even notice he’s gone. That’s probably in part because Barry himself was always more concerned with the well being of others than his own ego or self-promotion, but he is absolutely a person who should be mourned and missed, so here I am writing an improv obituary for him on Tumblr because I miss him already.

For anyone who’s read this and would like to do something for Barry, his wife Helen has cancer too and has been trying to raise money for her treatments. You can donate to her GoFundMe here. Beyond that, I leave you with a small selection of tweets from Barry that I personally found amusing or encouraging, and am saddened there will never be any new ones from him again.