My View on Bullying

This is the article that ran in Sunday's Tallahassee Democrat. Fortunately, I have not received a lot of hate mail, and the usual boneheaded commentators on the Democrat's website have kept away from taking me on.

All I want for the holidays is to see an end to the culture that enables bullying.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask during this time when the music in the malls is bright and cheerful with promises of joy and glad tidings.

When I was a teenager my classmates daily taunted me, pushed me, and threw things at me. They used anti-gay slurs even though I wasn’t out. It didn’t matter. They knew. And I was a target. Had it not been for the school chaplain, I would not have lived to be among those that can now say, “It gets better.”

If only all children had a trusted adult they could turn to during times of a life or death crisis. Not everyone has that kind of fortune as we have learned this year with the highly-publicized suicides of at least seven young people in only a few months. The cause of the suicide: bullying and attacks based on sexual orientation.

A recent survey by the non-profit Josephson Institute of Ethics based in Los Angeles found that half of the approximately 43, 000 teenagers questioned since 1992 had either bullied a classmate or been a victim of bullying. The issue has even reached the White House. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is reminding schools and universities that federal law protects students from discrimination. According to Russlynn H. Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights, punishing perpetrators of bullying is not necessarily enough to guarantee a student won’t face harassment based on their gender expression. Ali says schools have to follow through beyond the immediate incident to determine if there is a pattern that would lead LGBT students, or any other group being bullied, to feel that a school isn’t safe.

Locally, the Big Bend Anti-Bullying Task Force convened by Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda with Gentle Shepherd MCC and PFLAG-Tallahassee, is initiating a dialogue amongst school, university, mental health, first responders and social service organizations to look at the bullying problem. The goal is to make our area safe, and communicate a message that being cruel is not cool.

To get there, however, will take more than just the combined efforts of committed people at a table.

Bullies receive affirmation from leaders and other authority figures for tormenting those perceived as weak or different. It will be incumbent upon our elected and other leaders to consider the consequences of their speech and actions and how it feeds a culture of bullying. Do the words spoken in a public forum help to build up our society or tear it down by burying certain people at the bottom? How are we doing in our own conversations?

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our young people is to commit to improve the way we deal with each other. Instead of telling kids, “It Gets Better” let’s try to make it better now.