CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
"Back in My Day We Got Bullied And We're Better For It!"

Sunday, February 05, 2012

this entry brought to you by excision and datsik, "guess i got my swagger back"





If it's one thing that frustrates me, it's when old men start complaining about "kids these days", and comparing it to how it was when they were growing up. I've officially entered the age where even I will start doing it without even realizing it, and if I do it around you, please tell me to stop. Because it is exactly as bullshit hearing it now as a grown up as it was hearing it when I was a kid.

There's been a national campaign to stop bullying in schools, a reaction to a horrific string of suicides by gay teens (or, in some examples, teens that weren't even gay, but were perceived as gay). And when I first heard about this, about schools passing these new anti-bullying rules and commercials focusing on stopping bullying, all I could think was what took them so long. We needed something like that when I was a teen, we probably needed it even before then.

And yet I keep hearing adults, not just people I associate with, but also on television, even grown up gay men dismissing this effort, saying kids are too spoiled today, and that it going through what they went through just makes you stronger, gives you personality.

I find this mind blowing. The truth is I find that my sense of humor does in fact come as a defense mechanism, and I've always used it to avoid getting in fights. If I can cockily smirk at some idiot who is making fun of me and make him look like a bigger idiot-- in front of a crowd of people-- they have always shrunk down and walked away, trying to appear big, when everyone is laughing and shaking their heads with me. This is how it's always been, and it has stayed like that as a grown up. Dealing with bullies and blowhards has honed my heckler defense to a fine point, even if it wasn't something I was consciously aware of until recently. But I have a total of zero fights under my record, and it's not as if I was never in situations that might not have immediately exploded into something ugly. So, yes, I would say that bullying gave me personality.

It also has made me hyper sensitive, to the point that in any given social situation I always assume that everyone around me hates me, and even when people have shown me time and time again that they don't hate me and I've developed a level of comfort around them, I will assume they hate me and have always hated me at the smallest perceived slight. This causes me to have my defense mechanisms kick in even when they aren't needed, and I've said horribly mean things to people who I thought were being mean to me when they were just kidding around. And I've pre-emptively dropped bombs when a person looked like they were being cold to me, when in fact they were just more shy than I am. There's nothing worse than the sensitive guy bullying other people just because he thought he was being bullied when nobody else saw it that way. The instinct to go for the throat immediately under any perceived threat is not necessarily one that will win you friends, especially not in the work place. In high school it's shiv or be shivved, so if you need your mouth to survive, you'll use proverbial cover fire just to keep people away from you. But once you're out of high school, things don't necessarily work that way; you're just a mal-tempered, anti social asshole.

What I find especially frustrating about grown adults dismissing anti-bullying measures is that they're coming from an adult perspective. When people are assholes at work it can make you feel awful. But when you come home to your family, that's all over with. When you go out with your friends-- you know, the ones you've chosen to be friends with, not just the group of people you know that have grouped together to survive-- you can forget all the stresses of work. Or you can take a three day weekend by calling out sick just because you need some time to yourself. Or you can transfer to a different department, where you can spend more time alone. Or you can just quit. You can take your two week vacation, and spend that time looking for a different job. Even if it's in the same pay range, fuck it, if it means getting away from those assholes, so be it.

But high school is different. Its not your decision and your decision alone to just take three days off. You can't always just go to a different school. Sometimes literally just changing schools would be such a hassle for your parents and transportation and their schedules that it's literally impossible. And when the only people you know in your close life are also the people you know in high school, sometimes it's impossible to avoid bullying even when you go home. When you're a grown up, it's very, very easy to have a social life filled with people you never associate with on a professional level. School is different. It's very, very easy to have literally everyone you know in your age group going to school with you. If there's an asshole at school who pushes you and calls you names, the likelihood that asshole lives across the street from you is much higher than it would be past the age of 18.

But what especially angers me about these asshole grown-ups who say "In my day it wasn't cool to be a nerd! In my day we were beaten up every day! And I grew up fine!" is this: Of course you're not going to eliminate bullying. There's no anti-bullying rule, no commercial, no poster, no motivational speaker, no national climate that will ever remove bullying. Not in America, anyway. Look at us. We are an entire nation of bullies. It's still kosher to be a politician and say that gays are destroying America, to say that black people need to get off welfare, to say that the poor are lazy and using drugs, to say that Mexicans are ruining the economy! And not just in front of a church where nobody outside the room knows you said those things, on nationally televised debates, where this isn't just an opinion, but part of your platform. And even when American voters have decided finally and truly that this behavior is unacceptable-- and how long will that take?-- that is still the realm of adults. When kids stop behaving like this, in the hallways, outside the prying eyes of teachers, is going to be an even longer period of time, if ever. If it does, it'll literally take centuries. Our entire culture is going to have to change first.

But telling kids to stop bullying one another is not just a waste of breath. To me, what this campaign is attempting to do isn't stop the alphas from being alphas. It's to stop the betas from just joining along because they don't want to be seen as actually sympathizing with someone weak. This effort is to stop the second wrung kids who actually do feel bad for bullying from just joining in because it's easier to go along with the pack than not make fun of that kid. Maybe we'll never get to a point where the B-tier kids speak up and say "Hey Biff, leave George McFly alone, he's not so bad", but maybe we can keep those kids from joining in so it doesn't feel like the whole world is against the bullied. And maybe that'll be enough to convince a horribly depressed kid to hang in there and not commit suicide, that maybe it does get better.
-----



with love from CRS @ 10:50 AM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment