The Bully Pulpit
I have been noting the frequent stories in the news having to do with instances of bullying in the schools. They are sad and moving stories, often with results that defy our understanding at any level. We struggle to comprehend what’s in the mind of a young person who takes his/her own life to escape the torment of bullying, or what twisted motivations drive a bully to persecute someone else to the point of destruction. These tales challenge some of our most core beliefs about the “human condition” and therefore can leave us shaken with doubts and fears.
As I have thought about these episodes, the elements are always the same. There is always a victim, identified by some perceived vulnerability or personal characteristic, or maybe for no apparent reason at all, but somebody who bears the brunt of a bully’s attack. There is always a bully, focused on tormenting the life of his/her targets with whatever means available, including physical assault. And there is always the outrage, when we finally come to know of the injustice. The components are constant, as they have always been.
It’s not too difficult for any of us to recall episodes of bullying that we’ve either experienced, perpetrated or observed; it has been part of our lives. In fact, it has been a part of everyone’s life. What we have come to call bullying is simply the age-old phenomenon of people seeking to strengthen their own self-image and status by attacking the worth and value of others. After all, there are but two ways to climb the ladder of rank: strengthen myself upward or push someone else down. This is nothing new. History and current events are packed with the cases of those who have sought status at the expense of others whom they perceived to be exploitable. Consider Adolph Hitler. Or Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama.
So I am intrigued by the recent attempts by some to cure the world of its bullying ways so that no one ever has to cower in fear from the shadow of intimidation. For example, note the following excerpts from a Minneapolis StarTribune newspaper article from November 29:
Gov. Mark Dayton will appoint a task force to explore the best methods used nationwide to confront bullying, a problem that affects more than 100,000 students a week in Minnesota, according to a 2011 study by the state Departments of Health and Education.
“The time has long since passed to step up and say, ‘Enough, this does not have to be this way,’” Dayton said.
He said he wants to see “a Minnesota where every child can go to school and know it’s a place where they are valued and loved, where school is for learning and creating your future.”
“We need to take the roof off and look at who’s in the schools today,” said (State Representative Jim Davnie), adding that schools are more diverse than they’ve ever been. “Just saying, ‘Be nice,’ isn’t enough. The bullies know where the low-hanging fruit is.”
Brooklyn Center schools Superintendent Keith Lester said he hopes the task force will look beyond the surface to the organizational flaws that allow bullying to happen. “What I would hope is they would dig real deep,” he said, adding that the study should go beyond crime and punishment, at “rather what causes bullying and what are some of the things you do systemically to prevent bullying.”
It’s an interesting initiative, and one which I hope results in great success in identifying the motivations of a bully. Perhaps the task force will identify tactics and techniques of modern-day bullies that can be negated by policy or practice. But it seems to me that we might just as well launch a study into understanding what makes some of us overly competitive or greedy or insensitive or ungrateful. We humans have exhibited such behaviors since our first days on two feet; in my estimation, eliminating and preventing such tendencies just isn’t going to happen.
I suspect that there is no systematic means of preventing bullying because it is not a systemic matter. Bullying is personal, individual, the result of whatever combination of experiences has warped the perpetrator, and driven him/her to launch the perverted assault. Others certainly can and have joined in such bully assaults, but primarily because they, too, carry around a self-formed need to crush someone else in order to raise themselves up. Sadly, it’s part of who we are from time to time, each of us.
Consider our own tendencies for bullying. It happens on the roadways every day, as drivers with vehicles either twice as big or three times as fast as the norm try to command spaces to which they aren’t entitled. It happens to people in service jobs continually, as unhappy customers ramp up their unhappiness by volume and vocabulary to obtain the satisfaction they feel they deserve. It happens as a matter of course with our political representatives, who today feel that the art of compromise and negotiation is demonstrated by yelling louder and threatening longer than their opponents. It is unnervingly evident at today’s sporting events, particularly in contact sports, where our daily insufficiencies and insecurities are exorcised vicariously through the often brutal competitions that leave us in bloodthirsty screams of delight; taunting and unsportsmanlike penalties notwithstanding, we still love the dominators.
Visions such as Governor Dayton’s are wonderful to dream, and he certainly isn’t alone in his attempts to wrap the state’s arms around the problem. Intellectually, most of us would cherish the notion of school as a place where children are valued, loved, where school is for learning and creating your future. What a vision! But bullying isn’t the result of a particular school policy or the outcome of a system gone awry. Bullying is the reflection of the darkness which lives in each of us, that place of frightening reality which is always prepared to break through to the light of day but for the strength of our wills in preventing it to do so. Whether one attributes such defense to discipline or character or morality, it is a thin barrier that prevents any of us from becoming the bully. Remember that the next time you feel compelled to cut someone off in traffic, or to yell at a gate agent, or belittle a waitress. Elimination of bullying comes from the recognition of just who the bully is….
