Bullying Gets It's Day in Court

It is about time that bullies were held accountable. Many people see bullying as harmless fun, but it is anything but that. It can cause a childhood full of fear and anxiety; trust me, I know. Every single day of my junior high and high school life was spent in fear of being beat up because I had said something to upset someone.

This is serious and, not unlike so many things today, for some reason comes with convoluted reasoning. Someone is relentlessly bullied, ridiculed, teased or somehow psychologically tortured for years. No matter who you are, how strong or determined you are, this will have a negative affect on you. For some it might be simply a bad memory, but for others it might cause irreparable damage.

An example: I had a classmate who would tease a set of twins who had Cerebral Palsy. They both had a difficult time walking, so their gait was difficult and halting. He would follow them down the hall in school, imitating how they walked. He and his other "cool" friends would laugh hysterically. These twin's lives were difficult enough, and this taunting did nothing but add to it unnecessarily.

The one twin died shortly after high school, and the other is alive today, living a meager existence. The classmate, he went on to be an outstanding college football player and successful high school football coach, loved and respected by all. Oh yeah, I'm sure his supporters would say, "That was years ago. He wouldn't do it today" or "Everybody was teased, it's just kids being kids". To this I say a resounding BULL SHIT!

It's time we looked upon bullying not as an act, but as a tool of harassment. It should be seen as a noun, and not some little meaningless verb. It is dangerous. When kids today fight back years of taunting with a knife or a gun, this is the only way they can get it to stop. But when you retaliate with a weapon, you are now seen as bad and evil, and the tormentor as the victim. This, too, is plain and simple "BULL SHIT!"

Our job as adults is to make sure that the adults of tomorrow, the kids of today, know what kind of behavior is or is not acceptable. This is a huge responsibility, and causes us to also act as adults. But if each subsequent generation "unlearns more and more, what will we end up with? This is our task, and it needs to be taken seriously.