Every time the subject of bullying comes up, in my mind come two questions. First, do bullies remember being bullies? Second, do they remember who they bullied?
In New Jersey, a Bill of Rights focused on bullying was signed by Governor Christie. It is designed to make school students and faculty aware of their responsibilities to prevent harassment, intimidation and bullying. It aims to form committees, involve law enforcement, and encourage active participation to stop negative behaviors before they get out of control.
Though I’m a bullying survivor, nobody ever asks me for my opinion, because it’s been awhile since I dreaded the possibility that I would set foot inside my school and find myself on the receiving end of an attack. Once school is out, nobody remembers or cares. The end of school is like the end of war: whatever happened, folks would rather forget about it and move on. But servicemen come back from war with horrors etched into their souls, and emotional scars, regardless of origin, don’t just go away.
I can tell you from experience that, somewhere in the list of causes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), there should be a section devoted to being a victim of bullying and the lingering emotional pain it can cause.
Harassment, intimidation and bullying are all steps on the ladder of racism, ethnic cleansing and outright war, in that they attack the existence of humanity on an individual as well as a group level. Even though we are moving toward a global understanding and tolerance model, we still have not gained enough common sense to realize that no single-minded population exists without some outliers on either side of what is considered the norm. We tend to think of the differences between our own social groups with such stubborn prejudice that it would be just as easy to wage a war between coffee and tea drinkers as it would be to put a religion against another just because one does this and the other that.
Once I saw a news story on television about the symmetry of the human face. There actually isn’t any. If one were to take one side of their face and duplicate it for the other side, the resulting face would be astonishingly different. That’s because life itself has no set of features, no symmetry or perfection. Groups form because they share common bonds, but not all of the bonds are the same. Sadly, if somebody has a flaw that the others don’t like, they will reject that individual in spite of all they have in common. Bullying is just a part of that sad journey toward rejection rather than acceptance.
Besides, after school has ended and we have all gone off to live our lives, I don’t think anybody has had somebody say to them, “Congratulations on telling So-and-so how (insert putdown here) they were. That shows you really are a person of character.”
I hear the Bullying Bill of Rights is some 16 pages long. I don’t think it will help, either. Words and threats are the bully’s weapons in the first place. It is an appeal to the soul that is needed. Bullying damages souls on both sides. That is an argument for another time, but it does need examining before bullying can truly be stopped.
—To Be Continued.
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