Dealing with bullies

By Mark Thornton

April 25, 2007 12:48 pm

— Schoolyard bullies have been around as long as there have been schools. Confronting them with semiautomatic weapons is what’s relatively new. Predictably, the subject of bullying — which is loosely defined, it seems to me — is back in vogue after the massacre at Virginia Tech.
It’s also been a topic in an ongoing feud between five Ethel High School students and their parents. The parents of all the children involved seem to think their children were being bullied and simply defending themselves. And now, all of the students are in the alternative school.
Now, I have no idea what happened to cause the fight.
But I am certain of two things: 1.) Whichever parent you talk to, their kid didn’t do anything wrong; 2.) Being sentenced to the alternative school is one of the possible punishments for fighting at school. Says so in the student handbook.
Now, does that mean it’s always wrong to fight in school?
No, I don’t think so. I’ve thrown a few punches in my life, and my face has caught even more, so I know what it feels like to be backed in a corner and to come out swinging. Sometimes we don’t have any choice.
But there’s a difference these days. Kids don’t seem to be able to have a good, old-fashioned fist fight any more. When I was in junior high and high school, we could bloody each other’s noses one day, and be hanging out together the next day. It was over.
But now, there has to be retaliation to regain street cred. And that’s almost never done with fists.
How did we get to this point?
Ask 10 people and you’re likely to get 10 different answers. And it’s possible that all of them would be correct, but none of them would be complete. With the combination of things that have brought us to this point, we couldn’t skim the surface in this space.
Gangsta rap. Godlessness. Movie violence. Media sensationalism. Parents. Poverty. Videos. Video games. Gun access. Gun restrictions. Divorce
None of those alone will cause a problem with a normal person. But plant any or all of them in the head of a hopeless sociopath, and we have a perfect storm. Like the ones at Colombine and Virginia Tech.
Anyone who tries to simplify the problems of our society is fooling themselves. To understand the scope of the social phenomena in our nation, just witness the perpetrators. We have unsupervised ghetto kids with no hope and high-maintenance suburban kids with all the opportunity in the world ... and many of them wind up with the same problems, at the same destination. How does that happen?
Again, it’s too complicated to get into here.
Back to our local fight. Maybe some of the kids were justified. That’s possible.
But being sent to the alternative school is one of the clearly defined consequences of fighting at school, for any reason. And parents have to let their children face the consequences. That’s life.
It’s doubtful that the penalty for a fist fight would be so severe if not for the risks of the aftermath. It’s the world we live in now. And if something put other kids in harm’s way because school officials failed to act, they would have a whole other set of problems. A much, much worse set of problems.
Ethel Principal Roger “Dube” Hill and Superintendent Curtis Burrell did what they were supposed to do in this situation.
Being right doesn’t always mean being fair.
And that’s another good life lesson.

Mark Thornton is editor/publisher of The Star-Herald.