Bullying...OMG My Blood is Boiling and My Heart is Breaking

Alright so I just watched the bullying videos and I’m honestly so disgusted and disheartened right now that I really don’t know where to begin. After watching those videos I am feeling a slew of emotions from sadness to anger yet the one feeling I don’t have is surprise. As much as these videos horrified me they didn’t surprise me one bit and that is what I am most sad about. I feel that I have become so jaded to the hatred and meanness that exists in this world, that while it still saddens and angers me to my core, it just doesn’t surprise me anymore because I have come to realize that there are just so many cruel people in this world.

So now I have to decide where to start since I have so many thought and emotions that I want to share. I apologize for the length because I have a feeling I’m about to go on a rant.

I guess I’ll first go back to my middle school days. Now for many children middle school can be a tough time and I was no exception.  I was and always have been someone who never really fit into any “clique” per say. I could be a loner, yet I had friends, but my friends were often piece meal friends from different groups; I never really had a group of my own that I belonged to (or at least not that I felt I belonged to). Yet I always had an intense desire to fit in and belong. Now for all of you ladies out there you know how girls can be, especially adolescent girls; mean, caddy, vindictive, jealous, secretive, back stabbing and worst of all they befriended you to your face and plot against you behind your back). In 8^th grade I began getting more involved in the Internet. I loved to go onto AOL and AIM and chatting with my friends. I had a profile on AOL and I loved to surf different chat rooms and talk to complete strangers. (Looking back on it I was lucky that I was always a smart girl because Internet safety was not stressed then the way it is today and I’m sure there were times when I may have been talking to child pedophiles or criminals of some sort.) During my 8^th grade year I began getting horrible instant messages from screen names that I didn’t know. If was obvious they were girls and they would say mean things to me such as, “you’re ugly, everyone hates you, don’t come to school, stay away from everyone because no one likes you.” Now I being the type of person who dreads confrontation would just ignore them and sign off line. I never once responded to them. I eventually found out who they really were. They were girls who were nice to my face in school and then trashed me on line while they hid behind their computer screens. As it went on it seemed to anger the girls even more that I wouldn’t respond to them. They became angrier with me and began calling me a bitch and yelling at me for not responding back to them. I was lucky because eventually the bullying just stopped. During high school I experienced more bullying. I would receive nasty emails at times, but the worst came from my supposed “best friends.” To make a long story short my 2 best friends signed onto my AOL account (yes I was the stupid girl who shared her pass word with her friends) and changed my profile to say horrible things about themselves. Then they called me screaming at me for all the horrible things that I said about them in my profile. Having no idea what they were talking about I immediately signed on to check out my profile and found what they were talking about. I knew that I hadn’t done it and they were the only 2 people who knew my password so I knew they must have done it. What comes next is the worst part. Did I get mad and yell at them and end my friendship with them? NO. I being that lonely girl who just wanted friends and just wanted to be liked by everyone proceeded to beg them to forgive me and to please believe that I didn’t post those things about them. It makes me cringe now to think about what low-self esteem I had back then. With all this said I consider myself to be lucky. Being bullied didn’t impact me so greatly that I didn’t want to go to school or that I felt like my life was ruined or worse that I felt like I wanted to take my own life.

Unlike me the children I watched in these videos were not so lucky; in particularly Megan Meier and Ryan Halligan. Watching both of these stories brought me to tears and deeply saddened me. As a human being I have never understood how other human beings derive pleasure from tormenting and degrading others. My students know that the biggest expectation in my classroom is respect and if I find out that someone is being mean or disrespectful or intentionally hurting others I become incredibly upset and angry.

When it comes to bullying I hear many people say things such as, “oh it’s a rite of passage, it’s just kids being kids, everyone goes through it, grow a tougher skin etc…” Well there is a huge difference between the bullying of then and the bullying of now. Today’s bullying is nonstop, it’s 24/7 and that is due to technology. Children no longer view their home as a safe place where they are protected because the bullies have now entered their homes through a computer screen. And now that they can hide behind their computer screens the words they use and the lengths they go to in their bullying is much more sever then in the past. Children that are persistently bullied and teased at school are now being persistently bullied at home as well. Just ask yourself how long you could go on being bullied nonstop.

Due to this new computer world that we live in parents need to be much more rigorous about their involvement in their children’s lives. If they aren’t already tech savvy then they need to learn quick because monitoring their children online may just save their life.

My last point that I want to bring up is accountability and the law. It baffled my mind that the mother who set up Megan Meier was not held accountable for her actions. How can the law do nothing after her despicable behaviors? First off I’m so horrified that a grown woman could do this to a child. I honestly don’t even know what to say about that. Then there was poor Ally in Australia whose mother reached out to the school and was given no help in regards to her daughter being tormented on a daily basis to the point that she couldn’t manage to stay in school for even 15 minutes. When is the law going to step up and hold people accountable for their actions? Children are dying? At what point will something more be done. I guess that until the law can catch up with technology we may continue to live in a society where you can tell another person that the world would be better place without them and nothing will happen to them.

For those of you who stuck with me and read through this whole blog post I appreciate it a lot and I hope that you too share my anger and sadness.