Wanna Change The Tone? Stop Bullying

As I have blogged earlier here, I am in the midst of writing a book on autism and particularly growing up and finding a place in the world with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.

If anything from the last year’s domestic events should be absorbed – from assassinations to gay suicides to shootings – it should be that we need to really look in the mirror about the way we treat one another. Anger and despair don’t come out of nowhere even if we act like they do, and it usually starts early. Really early.

As my colleague Nate Parham at Voice of the Migrant has noted many times, there has been years of research on bullying. It’s a very real phenomenon that, for some reason, is accepted as a permanent cultural norm. Sure, being a little mean to your guy friends is normal and so is a degree of hazing, but the sort of bullying that many have experienced at the most fragile conscience forming period of childhood is simply not acceptable.

In this I refer to being stuffed into lockers (which rapper Eminem talks about in a 60 Minutes special), having rocks, chalk and barbells thrown at your head (which happened to me, among other metal objects over the school years).

I once heard a story from an Iranian-American woman of how children tried to hang her when she was in elementary school. With stories like that, why is it that we are not focussing on bullying in schools (which, by law, students are forced to attend) instead of obesity?

There are many elements of bullying that could be addressed by policy. One is that is an observation I’ve made as an adult is that the animosity is strongest when people are encroaching on one another’s turf, so to speak, a relic of our tribal beginnings. The bullying for myself was most intensified when I attended a mostly minority school in which I stood out not only as a white boy but a horribly socially awkward one. Tom Matlack, a writer for the Good Man Project, reiterates this element:

I grew up in a household of Quaker pacifists. My dad taught me early on that civil disobedience is stronger than fists and guns. Gandhi and Martin Luther King accomplished what no army could. In Amherst, Massachusetts, where I grew up, there was an uncomfortable mix of rural kids and faculty brats—and as a brat who stood head and shoulders above the rest—six feet tall by the seventh grade—I became a natural target for bullies hoping to prove their mettle.

One particularly tough kid started bumping into me in the hall in front of all my classmates. When I wouldn’t respond, he grabbed my books and threw them down the hall, yelling at me for being a sissy. Finally, he figured out my schedule and waited for me outside each of my classes, pinning me up against the nearest locker to spit in my face.

That is often the result of policies of forced association – bussing being another good example – in which groups that don’t necessarily want to be around each other end up around one another.

Now, I can easily imagine a critic say that there is alot of room for allowing racism in that argument. Isn’t “forced association” the only way to equalize an uneven playing field? That is a sophisticated argument that I think works better in other elements than within education. By law, schools shoul sh should be required to adhere to anti-discrimination laws settled upon long ago.

However, a degree of voluntary separation (not along the lines of race) would help immeasurably in our educational system. Charter schools are part of this movement. Imagine a utopian vision for a second – in which instead of being placed within a one-size-fits-all school, students with notable talents are able to attend schools geared towards those specific talents (like Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, only publicly funded, for any comic book nerds out there) while students with special needs would be able to attend schools specifically aimed at them with staff prepared for them, and without the “short bus” stigma.

The above suggestions would decrease bullying. Also too would be a shift in our freaking about drugs and terrorism and worrying more about children, the most important resource we have.