Bullying and Teasing, Kevin Jennings and Teen Suicide

Bullying and Teasing, Kevin Jennings and Teen Suicide

I don’t remember being bullied in school and no one I know was ever “bullied” or was a “bullyer,” in the contemporary senses of those terms. Of course, in the interests of full disclosure, having attended parochial school, bullying wasn’t allowed since nuns generally attended to that duty.

I do recall, occasionally, teasing when I was the teaser without intending the teasing to in any way connote threats or intimidation and some dumb older kids sometimes asserting their age and size by being overbearing. At least one of those dumbasses ended up in prison, another became a teacher.

Our version of “bullying” typically involved vain pre- and post-adolescent efforts to gain attention from inattentive girls many of whom surreptitiously loved the attention but felt compelled to maintain the requisite façade of disinterest.

Both genders survived but times have changed.

Today, bullying is considered by the PC crowd as little short of character assassination or attempted murder–and young people are buying into that absurd hyperbole.

Okay, back in my day when we were circling the wagons and trying to survive Indian onslaughts, we had more things on our minds than Mary Jane and her persnickety uppitiness but, still, if Mary Jane had missed our subtle romantic overtures of hiding her hair ribbons, she wouldn’t have ended it all by leaping out of the stagecoach into some abyss.

As I said, times have changed.

Thanks to a super-charged media obsessed over bullying and its disturbed offshoot, cyber-bullying, the subject is front-page news. Compound that media-created awareness with the availability of Facebook and Twitter and emails, some nasty kids are now able to taunt, harass, and threaten vulnerable kids more or less anonymously and often with impunity.

Add to that supercharged hysteria and unsocial media school administrations that post strict anti-bullying guidelines which are largely unenforceable and, if enforced, are ridiculed, too many young people today now take seriously what was formerly ignored or dismissed as irrational, envious, and jealous ad hominem rants by miscreants.

Regrettably, a relatively minuscule number of teens and even pre-teens are unable to deal with the stress created by those miscreants and resort to the ultimate solution for what is invariably a passing problem.

In actuality, teen suicide rates, with one notable exception, haven’t increased appreciably over the last few decades and are in line with the overall numbers of people who opt for that final answer chosen by tens of thousands of Americans.

However, try to explain those stats to some fifteen year old girl who has been nominated for Slut of the Year by a Facebook adversary intent on snatching her boyfriend or to a fourteen year old boy called a pimply queer for all the world to see on Twitter and it’s a lost cause.

For a certain segment of young people, bullying has been catastrophic.

What is rarely noted concerning teen bullying is the above-referenced exception and that the chief impetus of the phenomenon derives not from any grassroots demand for a remedy but from the government of President Barack Obama.

More specifically but not exclusively, the man responsible for exaggerating the problem is the former Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education, Kevin Jennings. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5527.)