Missed opportunities...

Our society seems so intent on punishing wrong doers that we sometimes mistake the forest for the trees and miss opportunities to correct problems before they occur.

I read with sadness the story of the young man who chose suicide after being cyber bullied at Rutgers recently. This young man was so clearly distraught about the bullying behavior of others that he chose to jump from the George Washington Bridge to his death.

Since then, others have come forward with other stories of cyberbullying and other forms of bullying that have caused young people to do horrible things - suicide, etc... While it is sad to hear of such behavior, it is nothing new. Technology might have made it more widespread (to those who care to look for those things), but the anti-social attitudes represented by bullying teens are well-documented and rarely punished.

Had we Americans reacted to stop bullying after its most shocking incident, we might not have been in this situation right now. But we didn't. Instead, we looked upon the two young men who were bullied and villified them for their reactions to their incessant hazing (and rightfully so) without also addressing the people who bullied them.

I'm talking, of course, about Columbine. Lost in all the discussion about the evil actions of two disgruntled teenagers was the fact that these kids had been hazed and bullied by many of the people on their "hit" list. Instead of going to the nearest bridge and leaping to their deaths and a tragic suicide, they reacted to their bullying by buying guns, making bombs, and going after the people who had bullied them and a community of students that had done nothing to prevent the bullying from occurring.

I'm not justifying their reactions - far from it. I think they were completely wrong and totally evil in what they did. But I can also see how in their own eyes, they were justified in their response.

Some people who are bullied simply take it. They are miserable and depressed, but they don't fight back. Some people complain and are usually ignored or given the old, "boys will be boys" speech. But a few others fight back and stand up for themselves and for others who have been bullied. The longer and harder they were bullied, the more vicious the response can be.

In Jr. High, I was bullied (who wasn't really?) My response, most of the time, was to try and ignore it. But one time, the bullies crossed the line. The squirted mustard in my Dad's baseball glove. I walked over to where they were playing handball, waited patiently for the ball to come to me, and then I tossed the ball as far away as I could throw it. The bullies were ticked. They couldn't believe that I had fought back. They complained to the school dean. I told the dean what had happened and showed him the glove with the mustard in it and all he did was basically call it even. (Hardly...)

As a corollary to this, a friend of mine was also a frequent target of bullies. One day after school he came up to me and told me that he had gotten even. What I didn't know was that he had beaten a boy so severely that he had ended up in the hospital. Since it had been a mutual fight (though one sided) the only action taken was that my friend was suspended from school. But this was a much more severe response to bullying.

I am happy that people are finally talking about bullying. With the internet, such behavior can now have very serious and real world long term effects and so perhaps it has become time to end this type of behavior for all time. But it seems to me that with bullying as the main cause behind the most horrific school shooting ever, we probably should have looked at the real world consequences of such behavior back then. Either way, bullying should end now and its up to the parents and teachers to see that this kind of behavior becomes a thing of the past.