Stop Dragging My Heart Around, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

April 10, 2010 Martha Thomases 8 Comments

According to my network television news, there is an epidemic of bullying in this country.  It’s new, sexy bullying because the Internet is involved.  Kids not only taunt each other at school, but on Facebook and other social networking sites.

The most horrific story led to a student committing suicide.  With this story out in the open, there were soon more reports of suicide in children, some as young as nine years old.  There is now talk about criminalizing bullying.

I don’t think that is going to work.

As a progressive, I’m frequently in favor of getting the government involved in all sorts of things:  healthcare, emergency rescue services, fire fighting, hate crime fighting, roads and mass transportation, even the occasional parade.  However, I don’t think there’s a single person who can be accused of a criminal activity in these cases.

As a child, I wasn’t bullied, so maybe I have no authority to speak on this subject.  I was hazed a bit, and sometimes felt excluded from groups I wanted to include me, but, for the most part, I was too inconsequential to elicit such strong feelings in others.  Neither was I knowingly a bully, although I did push my little sister around because that’s what older sisters do.  So maybe I don’t have any credibility on this issue.

However, I did have suicidal thoughts as a kid, and I read Lord of the Flies and recognized in it people I knew.  And, as a mother, I saw how kids behave on playgrounds, for good and for ill.

Bullying doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  To mix metaphors, it’s a soup with an infinitely variable recipe.  Start with a kid who feels helpless and ignored.  Add another kid who appears to be weak.  Season with adults who don’t care, and add a dash of peer pressure.  Voila!  Bully!

Sometimes the bully is him or herself bullied by a parent, and learns the behavior at home.  Sometimes the parents’ prejudices feed the bullying, so that members of minority groups get pummeled.  Sometimes adults in authority believe that kids need to work these disputes out for themselves.

I confess that I sometimes think kids need to work things out themselves.  One of the most important elements in any kind of children’s play is arguing about the rules.  However, I formed this opinion in a simpler time, when kids played together with few electronic aids.  You can argue about the rules for a game on the playground.  It’s more difficult to argue about rules for a video game.

We didn’t let our son play with video games in our home when he was in elementary school.  We knew he was playing at his friends’ homes, but we had our own rules.  I didn’t like the rigidity of the games at the time (late 1980s to mid-1990s).  I thought they were violent and dehumanizing.  That can be entertaining, I know, but its the kind of entertainment I thought should be reserved for those old enough to understand how reality worked.

Instead, especially before kindergarten, we played things that taught empathy.  We fed the squirrels.  We played restaurant and made up silly dishes to put on the menu.

Super hero comic books are great for teaching empathy.  So many characters are secretly dweebs.

So, who should go to jail when someone is a bully?  I’m all for the bully suffering consequences for his or her actions, but I don’t think jail is the right punishment.  Instead, something that teaches empathy would be better.  Community service of some kind, maybe.  Role playing to see what it feels like, all the way around.

In the meantime, let’s broaden our definition of bullying.  For example, this case, for some reason, didn’t get included in the hysterical news stories to which I referred earlier.  It seems to me to be precisely that, however.  The kids who set it up are bullies, and so are their parents, who clearly helped them to do so.  Maybe in their communities, it’s not bullying if it’s gays and lesbians.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses a life.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases used all her will power not to title this column, Wooly Bully.