Joel Morales, 12 years old from Harlem. He hanged himself in his apartment. I read his story in work during lunch and, as so many other bully assisted suicides have done over the years, it broke my heart. As an adult in the workplace, I steeled myself not to cry and to regain my composure. Some people might not take kindly to such sympathy and empathy in a business environment.
Then a bizarre thought came to me: Joel’s fellow students might prefer that I jump up and down with glee on the table and celebrate, because somebody they decided didn’t belong on this planet was gone, and why should anybody be sad?
Nowhere in the articles I’ve read does it say that the school grieves for him. Maybe some students can admit that, even when adults pressured him to tell them that he was being picked on, he didn’t snitch. He found it hard to talk about. It is hard to confide in somebody that, even though you are not a terrorist, murderer, child molester or ruling despot, little things can make ordinary people hate you.
So what was wrong with Joel Morales that he was bullied to death? He was short, and he was smart.
I guess that means the kids in the two Harlem schools he attended should only exist if they are tall and dumb? Not in this world.
Setting aside my opinions (that maybe those immature classmates should not be promoted to the next grade, or that the teachers should be fired, or the obvious bandage solutions like laws, counseling and more parental responsibility), as my heart protests in my ribcage and my blood pressure inches up and my brain cries out in frustration over bullying cases like this, I wonder what his classmates really have to say? One did tell authorities that a comment about Joel’s father, who had also died in a suicide, sent the young man over the edge.
One of the reasons why I didn’t go to see the Bully movie, was that reviews indicated that nobody interviewed actual bullies for the story, but concentrated instead on the victims.
Recently an anonymous caller to a feedback forum in the Camden, NJ Courier-Post newspaper confessed to being a bully and wanted to apologize for the damage done to past victims. Reading that, too, made me want to cry. I ache for the various aspects of the human condition, because I am also human. We all stray from our humanity on occasion, which is why there is bullying and a chance to repent. The solution to the bullying problem must really come from the perpetrators. I think it would really be interesting to hear from bullies about why they do what they do. And if being smart is a bad thing, I would even tolerate poor grammar and sentence structure to get the full story.
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