Once our society becomes more aware of the extend of personal bullying and its role in violence and criminal behavior, things would have to get better in this country, right?
I wish that were true. Many naysayers are found of using the term “slippery slope” to describe moral points of no return. We are afraid of legalizing marijuana, for example, because it may/will lead to harder drugs, etc. Chief William Bratton, when serving the New York Police Department, subscribed to the “broken windows theory” that ignoring trivial things like broken windows in the city leads to the deterioration of entire neighborhoods: vandalism first, then, bigger crimes against property and against people. In other words, “it gets worse.”
Why, then, do we allow child and adolescent bullying to go unchecked? Is it not a slippery slope for adult aggression, violence and crime?
There is a lot of conversation now about the bullying which has led to the self-hatred on the part of lesbian or gay teenagers which led to them taking their own lives. Another slippery slope that should be corrected, right?
As President Obama says in his It Gets Better Project video: “It breaks my heart. It’s something that just shouldn’t happen in this country. And we’ve got to dispel this myth that bullying is just a normal right of passage.”
Bullying is a sign of a deeply-rooted psychology of violence. School bullies often go on to become violent criminals as adults. If they are sufficiently motivated not deflect their own rage, it can often come out in resentment, hatred, racism, and those odd and dangerous political views that hold other people in suspicion and try to deprive them of equal rights and equal opportunity in our society.
If bullying were a “right of passage”—or something Jamie Nabozny was told by his high school principal, “boys will be boys”—then theoretically bullies would “grow out if it.” Instead, many “grow into it” and become more violent in their lives.
The story of Jamie Nabozny has just been released: “Bullied” premiered in Washington three weeks ago. Nabozny was a gay teen in small-town Wisconsin who was harassed relentlessly, attacked and even urinated on in the school bathroom. He tried running away from home, attempted suicide, and finally sued his school district and won a $900,000 settlement.
Ironically there is an anti-bullying law in California which has been on the books for seven years, but it has no teeth: no definitions of either bullying or of protected classes of people, and no penalties against schools or educational executives who decline to stop the harassment and violence in their schools. Nabozny’s successful lawsuit should have made a forceful point to all of America’s educational system that one school bully is like a “broken window” in a community, and it will almost always lead to a meaner, less civil, more violent society.
It is interesting to see the letter published in the Ashland, Wisconsin paper this week that shows some progress in local thinking there. Kaylie McCarthy, a 10-th grader there wrote, “Now, I ask the Ashland School Board this: do you choose to accept the mistakes made in the past, to help move on for the future and prove not only to us students, but the entire community, that leadership comes from acceptance? Or do we cover up the mistakes, and halt the progressions that’s been made thus far? As a proud Ashland High School student, all I know is that I look forward to seeing the documentary for myself.”
Looking at the larger society, In my view, the present political climate in America is a form of bullying on steroids—when inexperienced political wannabees think they can buy an election through forceful negative advertising and saturation of our TV channels; when a minority caucus or segment of elected officials think they can demand to have their way or shut the government down in retaliation. And is not war itself the ultimate form of bullying? —when one nation thinks that by intimidation, sheer force and aggression, violence and bloodshed, it can have its way in the world.
We live in a big city, and the bullying that takes place on our streets and highways has also reached a serious, fevered level. I have personally followed drivers in traffic, for example, who barely slowed down in slipping through stop sign after stop sign on the same route. Twice I have had a driver of a truck stop and get out of his vehicle and threaten me verbally for something he didn’t like. (One of those times I was a pedestrian who had yelled out “slow down!”) The slippery slope created by the dangerous, aggressive driver is convincing others to say “everybody does it.”
I doubt, however, that the civic discourse in this country will take that direction in reacting to the tragic suicides of recent weeks, because to see bullying as pervasive in our society would cause a great deal of social self-examination. America is no longer very good at self-examination. Like the playground or locker-room bully, our society tends to blame everything external for our own character flaws. It is always somebody else’s fault: socialists, communists, jihadists, the poor, the wealthy, illegal immigrants, people of color, the homosexuals and their “agenda,” etc.
If any good comes out of the tragic deaths of at least six gay teens this fall, it would be to trigger a serious self-examination of the American way of aggression.
—Pastor Dan Hooper
