Bullying takes many forms, from the physically visible to the more subtle comments made and spread among peers that often leads to the shunning by the bullies and the loneliness of the bullied.
In seeking the reasons why that quiet, seemingly harmless kid who hardly spoke to anyone could show up at school one day ,his own or some other, and shoot faculty, staff, and fellow students, we put together the picture of someone bullied by those he encountered every day whether or not they were active participants or tacit enablers.
Bullying is a pattern of deliberately and repeatedly harming and humiliating others, especially people who are in some way smaller, weaker, younger, and less powerful.
Although their favored tactic is to victimize those who are just outside the preferred normal or are not the members of the homogeneous majority, it is the bully who lacks proper ease with social behavior and lacks the understanding of the feelings of others. Bullies have easy access to prey and often employ others surreptitiously, unaware that they are the instruments of someone who enjoys what is being done to the victim without their direct involvement. They often start the rumor that others spread and the victim has to deal with. They pull the strings and watch the show.
When the victims have reached their limit after repeated and unaddressed bullying, they become a victimizer when their pent up anger reaches the breaking point, and they use whatever means seems the best release of it.
The outlets can be as mild as a tongue-lashing harangue that to onlookers appears to be totally unprovoked, or as extreme as a gun, but the victim who has been pushed to the edge will need to, and will find a way to get release.
Rationality, although preferred, is not a given.
Schools bring the bully, the unknowing allies, and the victim together in one location for the majority of their day, and the majority of a year. For students, school is the world they live in and have to navigate.
But bullying is not limited to school.
It happens at the workplace and it happens in society, the world that people live in and have to navigate, a world where those of the majority race and the majority religion find it easier to tear others down rather than take the time and exert the energy to understand others, and to get others to join in. Those who are threatened by some unknown thing are glad for someone to point out to them a target for their anger.
The bully’s stature is bolstered by someone else’s reduction.
They find a smaller vulnerable group, and spread disinformation so that others blindly bully people, convinced they are doing the right thing without examining the motivations of the person who is firing them up.
The best defender of the threatened is the person who invents the threat.
Utter humiliation levitra no prescription and shock eat away your mind. Some men buy cialis have no erectile dysfunction condition. It is also said that one can never get rid of erectile find out over here order levitra dysfunction completely from their life but you can get erection whenever you want to in those 6 hours for sure. A surprising number of men believe that pumps are levitra viagra price even better than other methods of enlargement including pills, creams, oils and extenders. Although many victims have previously felt that they were alone without the alliances enjoyed by the bullies, with the internet they can discover by research or by accident other victims, ways to deal with the bullying, whether rational or irrational, and the encouragement to either deal with the bullying quietly, or removing it completely to end it.
Consider a religion unknown to most people but explained by those who are not members, who have, perhaps, had no real involvement with it, and who pass on biased information they received from someone else just as disconnected.
Toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first third of the Twentieth during the hay day of immigration when the various cultural and ethnics groups had little contact with those outside their communities, one group’s understanding of another was based largely on what they were told as opposed what they experienced, yet each thought they knew the other well and correctly. In reality they knew only what the person who informed them thought was the reality. Basically, it was not so much that one group disliked who another actually was, but, rather, they disliked the stereotype no matter how far it was from reality.
When someone most like us commits a heinous crime, like a mass killing or school shooting, we view them as loners who acted out after years of bullying, something we equate with the cause of some form of mental illness and something that may produce a degree of empathy. When they are not like us, we look for reasons beyond ourselves for their having been radicalized.
This instantaneous response is too often expressed by politicians in sound bites and tweets.
With the “others” we have continually demonized their religions or differences, and this has opened them to bullying by the general public that calls them names, shuns them, or acts around them in subtle yet discernible ways that convey distrust and rejection. They may have done nothing beyond simply been somewhere, and people feel free to condemn them as stereotypes with hurtful and pseudo-patriotic words.
In the minds of some, patriotism is easiest to prove by yelling at someone in a Hijab, or someone speaking a foreign language even if that foreign language is Choctaw, loud enough for others to hear.
We think only children bully their peers, when in reality adults bully their peers, but in different ways and in adult places.
Those committing school shootings are in the majority male, white, conservative, and loners with poor social skills, the cause of which we look for after the fact, who have found encouragement from people of like mind with similar experience to take revenge on their world that has rejected them and whose bully has recruited allies to aid in the bullying. It is radicalization without the Hijab.
Those committing mass killings by gun, vehicle, or bomb are in the majority members of a cultural group or religion who have found encouragement from people of like mind with similar experience to take revenge on their world that has rejected them and whose bully has recruited allies to aid in the bullying by sound bites, political speech, or tweets.
We are adults, so we don’t bully people.
Except we do, and the result is the bullied adults resolve the problem by means accessible to adults.
The simple response to someone’s objection to being bullied is to tell them to either suck it up or to do something about it. The naivete is to assume that the way they deal with it will be more rational than the bullying.
While bullying causes a student to lash out and harm peers, we seem unaware that it works the same way with adults.