Bullying…

With all of the lip service people are currently paying to bullying (and to a great degree, it is lip service… sorry…. it is what it is) lately, it started me thinking about bullying on so many levels.

Kids have been bullied since people started to live in organized groups.  I don’t get why people seem to think that it is all of a sudden something that we HAVE to do something about.  True, now bullying can take on SO many new dimensions now that there is so much access to technology and it is so much more far reaching instantly, but it is no more painful now than it has always been.

Skag… dynomutt… scuzzy… scuzz bag… I’ve been all kinds of interesting names.  I’ve been pushed into lockers and tripped down the steps.

Horrible people will latch onto whatever they can find to latch onto to make themselves feel better at someone else’s expense.  Why that is what it takes to make someone feel better is beyond me… The feeling that you can get helping someone else who needs a hand, a shoulder, a leg up or just a ear has to be much better than the feeling you get when you make someone else cry or feel bad about themselves…. or worse.

I have always wanted to protect my kids from bullying… because I know the pain of being on the receiving end.  Maybe if I follow Adam’s logic and think about it, I would realize why (despite how far my RA has crept and how much damage there already is and how many impacted joints I continue to have) I just keep plugging and I don’t really let it stop me.  He says that people who are bullied have a much higher tolerance for pain.  Logic dictates that is probably true.

Much as I want to wrap them up and protect them, I know that I can’t.  I have to arm them because bullying doesn’t stop when high school stops.  As people grow, they become more insidious with their bullying… more passive aggressive… more subtle, but the bullying is still there.  When people get older, they are “supposed” to outgrow the need to bitch slap other people but they don’t.  When we get older, we are “supposed” to not be as hurt by the slapping… but it sill hurts, it still gets in your brain and eats away and your confidence… and they win.

Until people can learn to fundamentally give a damn about other people… until someone else’s problems can matter at all to other people, bullying will happen because there are just some people who are fundamentally mean.

I wish deeply that people (the people who do things like spray perfume or light smelly candles for no other reason than to because they believe THEIR rights are more important than someone else’s rights…. more important than someone else’s health and welfare… or the people who hunt for situations where they can toss someone else “under the bus”… you know… the people who wait for someone to ask a question and then to divert all attention from them to someone else they make a point of dragging up something that someone else has don’t “wrong”) would just GROW up and learn that everyone has pain and adding to someone else’s pain doesn’t make your pain less.

Bullying needs to stop… but as long as adults do it to each other… and countries do it to each other… how can we expect anyone else to “do as I say not as I do”.