Rarely do more than a few days go by without me hearing
about another victim of some sort of bullying, whether passive or active. Many
of them haven taken their own lives because simply trying to get by another day
was too painful and miserable. It is a truly depressing, heartbreaking, and
utterly horrible reality in today’s world. As someone who was severely
psychologically bullied as a very young boy, I can completely relate to the
many victims, and my heart goes out to them and to those hurt with them.
I have noticed that many people out there have taken
enormous action to promote awareness of the sheer amount of bullying that
occurs every day in schools across America and other nations. This activity has
become especially prominent on social networking sites like Facebook. As a
result, the campaign to raise awareness and work to prevent bullying seems to
having a significant amount of successes. Several major popular and highly
successful films have reached large audiences, and numerous institutions are
taking strong steps to prevent bullying.
On the one hand, this campaign against bullying is very
effective and inspiring, and by itself makes me very happy and determined to do
what I can to contribute to it. On the other hand, as I have begun to analyze
this campaign as part of a much larger context, I have become extremely
troubled because I notice it is in many ways quite shallow, ineffective, and
ignorance and negligent of much larger causes and issues that are directly tied
to bullying in schools across the USA. To truly begin to understand
bullying, we need to look at its place in our society, both historically and
presently. The question that we should start off with:
Do we as a culture and collective group, directly or
otherwise, support and/or encourage bullying?
Many Americans would immediately, almost as a knee-jerk
response, answer no; they are a moral people, and they recognize that bullying
is bad. Furthermore, their many various adult and authority figures, along with
their general government and society, officially declare that bullying is wrong
and should be punished. It is of course natural for people to explicitly condemn
bullying, along with other malevolent deeds, as well as believe they are
morally sound. Most Americans are also at least decent human beings, so their
attitude is somewhat grounded in fact.
The problem with this answer, however, becomes apparent upon
much closer inspection of everyday society. Bullying does not just occur at
schools; it is rampant in workplaces, in social gatherings, in entertainment,
in academia, in politics, in business operations, in international
relationships, and countless other fields of the present day. Bullying is also
not a new thing, despite what some may think. It is as old as time.
These facts by themselves are quite troubling, but there is
another angle from which we have yet to look: social and environmental
influences. If there is anything we human beings should have learned by now, it
is that we are extremely vulnerable creatures who are thoroughly programmed by
culture, so much so that we are often influenced without even realizing our
conditioning. We would like to believe we are independent (and in some ways,
that claim is certainly truer of some people than it is of others), but at the
end of the day none of us are truly so.
With our social programming in mind, let’s start to take a
look at America’s history, since before at its very inception. Long before the
USA even became an independent nation, many of the areas that be known as the
13 colonies were founded almost exclusively by two groups: vicious conquerors,
exploiters, and/or imperialists of various nations who were hungry for riches
and resources, and by Puritans, who supposedly came for religious freedom… and
then established ruthless theocracies.
Fast forward to the American Revolution: the Founding
Fathers were extremely wealthy and elitist landowners, slave owners,
businessmen, and con men (John Hancock, for instance, was a big time gangster
and smuggler, while it is well-known that George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson, among others, were slave owners). They created the Bill of Rights
mostly as a symbolic gesture and pacification of the majority, of whom they
were terrified. Since its creation, the Bill of Rights has been regularly
violated with impunity by America’s government, often in defense and support
wealthy and powerful interests. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers were intent
on having a government of, for, and by wealthy white men.
From there, the nation continued its development, largely
via the following: exploitation of various powerless groups (workers, poor
people, minorities, immigrants, etc.), egotism, manipulation via fear and chauvinism,
racism, violence, war, slavery, mass murder, and worst of all, genocide of the
Native Americans. Large-scale prejudice, along with various forms of
vigilantism, was rampant throughout society well into the 1960’s, though
thankfully the excesses of prejudice significantly toned down some successes of
the many civil rights movement. Modern American culture, however, has largely
replaced overt bigotry with much more covert and implicitly programmed
prejudice, especially towards minorities such as blacks, Muslims, Hispanics,
and gays. Finally, let’s not even get started on the countless lies,
manipulations, and deceptions told by the American government and oligarchy
throughout history to justify and/or pursue a treasure trove of thoroughly despicable goals,
including (but certainly not limited to) imperialist aggression, resource grabs, criminalizing dissent,
halting social reforms, and forced implementations of free market "reforms"
in foreign nations.
Can you say “bullying” yet?
If that’s not enough, let’s try to understand the role of
bullying even further by looking at the present and historical basis for our
society: the free market. Years of propaganda and bullshit aside, what does the
free market actually do? In short, it forces people to fight each other for
survival and any and every advantage they can get over everybody else (wealth,
materials, intellect, sex, etc.). As a direct result, we must do whatever is
necessary to gain more for ourselves and ensure less for every other human
being.
Now think about it…
…
And answer me this:
…
IS IT ANY FUCKING WONDER WHY BULLYING IS SUCH A PROBLEM?!!
No, and it shouldn’t be! We live in a culture that is built
on and thrives bullying!
If we truly want to deal with bullying, we need to change
our behavior and our environment. Period!
