Just Your Everyday Bullying

It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
  - Mark Twain

Recent stories of teen suicide caused by being bullied have brought a spotlight to the issue of bullying.  There has been talk of special committees to study the issue.  There has been talk of expecting schools of doing more to prevent student bullying.  There has been a lot of talk.  The talk, however, has concentrated almost exclusively on the problem with teenagers.  This is a pity because it does not address the entire problem and what may be the actual cause of teen bullying.

Bullies have always been with us. When I was in middle school many years ago, there was a group of three boys who tried to get me into a fight almost every day on my way to school.  Not knowing what else to do, I ignored them.  I just kept walking to school.  After many months (maybe it was only a few days, but it felt like many months), they finally gave up.  Some years later, when I was working over the summer as a playground supervisor, there was one boy who thought I should fight him.  I couldn’t because to do so would have lost me my job.  But slowly, I co-opted him until he used to come around and help at the playground.  It turned out he was just bored and needed something to do, or someone to recognize him. And he did it in the only way he knew how.

In later life, in my first civilian job, my boss kept telling me that if I personally did not bring in new business, I would lose my job.  The fact that I was an engineer, not a marketing type, made no difference.  I and I alone, was responsible for bringing in new business.  This too was bullying, a fact exacerbated by the fact that I was suffering through clinical depression at the time . . .  and he knew it. 

The fact is that bullying is all around us every day in overt and subtle ways.  The only question is whether, in any given situation, you are the bully or the bullied.  Are you the boss who berates a subordinate in front of others? Or are you the boss who gives in to a loud, insistent employee?  Are you the driver who insists on cutting in on another driver who has the right of way?  Are you the shopper who takes your frustration out on a store clerk who has absolutely nothing to do with your problem? Or are you the store clerk who uses your passive-aggressive capability to deny that same shopper, or the next one, proper service? Or are you the homeowner who lets in a pushy salesperson who insists that your house has a problem?  Or are you the pushy salesperson?  See if you can recognize yourself in any of these scenarios.

These are all examples of the bullying that we see every day.  And in most cases we feel helpless to do anything about it.  But if we do, the results can be tragic.  The two teenagers who carried out the shootings at Columbine High School were not ideological terrorists.  They had been bullied in that same high school and were now taking their revenge.  But that does not mean that, as a society, we cannot take action to curb the all too familiar bullying theme. 

Going back to teen bullying, let’s start at home.  As a parent, do you advise your child to take what’s his, regardless of the consequences?  Do you tell your child to stand up for himself and show him how to fight?  Better still, do you come home from one of the encounters I described above, and tell your children how you “told somebody off”, “got in their face”, or “got my way” and showed them how proud you were of it?  Did you ever show off to your child how you are “the man” by being aggressive toward someone else?  You tell your child that they shouldn’t bully the little kid down the street and you think that is all that’s needed.  Teenagers don’t pay much attention to what you tell them.  But they do take in how you act.  They are far more swayed by example that by words.  They want to see and emulate what you do, particularly those things that seem to enhance you.  Did you ever have a kid ask why you were mean to a store clerk, and your answer was because they deserved it?  Can you start to see now the reason for teen bullying?  Can you now start to see why some people go on to be bullies all their lives?  Like bigotry, bullying is an acquired habit, learned through example from those a child grows up looking up to. Are you the cause of bullying?  Think about it.

Holidays

The word holiday derives from the words holy day, and several of our annual holidays are based on Christian holy days. With the recent celebration of Easter, it got me thinking about these holidays.

Our principal Christian holidays are Christmas, Easter, St. Valentine’s Day and All Hallows Eve (Halloween).  The celebration of these days goes back to the early days of Christianity and the religious traditions for them are well established in our traditions. 

Islam and Judaism take the celebration of their holy days very seriously and their traditions too run deep. 

Our Christian holy days, on the other hand, are celebrated as a mixture of religious and pagan tradition.  Want a good example?  There were no such things as fir trees in Israel 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, for the religious among us, the pagan part of the tradition has become the more powerful and alluring.  Christmas is considered a success by the amount shoppers spend on gifts rather than how many people celebrate the birth of Jesus. One of my tree ornaments shows a harried woman lugging several shopping bags under the title, “Spirit of Christmas Stressed”.  Easter is celebrated with big family meals and by the state of the spring weather, rather than the remembrance of the crucifixion and resurrection.  St. Valentine’s Day and Halloween are about parties and candy.  And they are all dependent on the purchase and sending of cards. 

All of our holidays, both religious and otherwise, have now become associated with sporting events.  After all, you can’t have a perfectly good audience going off to thinking about their religious traditions when they can be distracted by a good basketball or football game.  And so at Christmas, it is National Basketball Association games.  At Thanksgiving, it is football, both Canadian and American.  New Year’s Day and many days before and after, it is US college football.  And at Easter it is often US college basketball (“March Madness”) and sometimes a golf tournament called the Masters where Amen consists of the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th holes at Augusta National Golf Course.

The trend, or should I say headlong rush, toward secularizing holy days is a shame because it masks the beauty and tranquility of the religious observance.  A midnight church service at Christmas with its solemn formality and the beautiful Christmas music can be a wonderful way of releasing the tension that the other aspects of Christmas inevitably cause.  A sunrise service on Easter Sunday can evoke the glory of the resurrection and spring like nothing else.  The secular side of the holiday traditions seem to be designed to cause stress and confusion.  The religious traditions of holy days usually result in tranquility of the soul and body.

So let’s try and bring more of the religious tradition back to our holidays/holy days and reignite the beauty and peace that these traditions can evoke.  Non-believers are advised not to celebrate any of these holy days in order to preserve their ideals.