But back to the news because the annual anti-bullying week this year was a news anomaly. Somehow five teen suicides of actual bullied-to-death homosexuals made it into the news in the same week. Understand there are thousands of teen suicides each year, so five in any given week is, in fact, a given. Five in one week? Five that they counted. The synergic media magic beauty part was that this particular week also happened to be the kick-off of National Bullying Prevention Month and, as if by magic, America suddenly, briefly, almost actually cared that kids are getting tormented to death. A growing epidemic finally got its fifteen minutes in a news cycle.
But only after it promised to be forgotten in time for the next news cycle. Though in the meantime, the stats are indeed staggering. Every day one hundred and eighty-six thousand bullied victims don't even go to school because of the harassment. Each year about 40% give up on school and thousands give up on everything entirely.
Yes, yes, i know, that is just a few more tears in the ever flowing stream. This is just that old "same as it ever was" epidemic tale of bullied victims who always were and still are pummeled relentlessly from sea to shining sea, despite the martyrdom of St. Matthew Shepard. Though nobody is willing to lay out a current and complete statistic, but the most common figures you can find say the teen suicide rate tripled from the 70s to the 90s, and has, since then, only continued to grow. Suicide has become the 4th most common cause of death in kids 10-14, the 3rd for 15-20 and 2nd most common for 20-25. About 12 out of every 100,000 teens will kill themselves and as many as twenty-five times that number will try.
Our children torment and tease each other every day in every way one can say "you're gay!" and still they get away with it. Nobody wants to be the baby who wimps out and couldn't handle a little "playfully" doled out misery. It is the one gift most kids prefer giving. And nobody is supposed to complain because hurting each other is so much fun. Meanwhile most adults look away because they are closet-bullies themselves. It's the one way the right's not afraid to come out of the closet. That is the society our children live in. And then we wonder why they do not learn?
Well, as their teacher, i can tell you your kids are learning plenty. They know how to "kill," "maim," and belittle their enemies and/or opponents in most major gaming media. They know how to turn a phrase till it cripples and when to relish the sight of pain in others. They know exactly which muscles to twitch when they fake lunge at each other to get that maximum scare effect, which buttons to push to best piss off the world.
And, where do the bully-kids learn it? From their Tea Party Lovin' parents, of course, who bully them around the house all night, so they can bully their fellow kids around the playground all day. Meanwhile they don't know where Poland is, why the water cycle matters, what a noun is or what a verb does. And neither do their parents. But both generations know how to push their way to get what they want, don't they? By bullying of course, it's the American Way. Babies raising babies and with nobody playing parent, no one learns why it's bad to be bad. Whether or not you agree that that's where we came from, it appears to be where we are headed.
Take my current favorite bullying exploit, told in many places, but most engagingly in Josh Holland's AlterNet article, "Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work -- Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee." Wanna see what that whole "smaller government" thing Sarah Palin loves looks like? Here you go:
It's the case of a Mr. Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee. The Republican run local government voted to keep taxes low by not operating the county-wide fire department. Firefighting is, you know, one of those basic kinds of government services most Americans say they see as the bare minimum of what they'd expect to get when they pay their taxes. Instead, in addition to country taxes residents in rural Obion County were required to pay a separate $75 fee for fire service.
Long and short of it, Cranick hadn't paid. The fire broke out in some barrels near his home, then crawled across the field as a brush fire, until it engulfed his home. Cranick watched his life be destroyed in slow motion. He tried to be a responsible citizen and went after the fire with his own resources, but his garden hose just couldn't handle it. It was a time when he needed his government. And they refused him.
The firefighters came and did nothing as they watched the fire leap from the barrels to his house, utterly destroying it and killing the household pets. Throughout that whole infernal process, and even before hand, while he was on the phone with 911, Cranick repeatedly tried to pay the fee. But the firefighters just stood by, though eventually they did bust out their hoses when the next neighbor over's property was threatened. He had paid the fee. They were good loyal Republican firemen, one and all, Tea Party pure.
The firemen knew that the pure beauty of the American "Free Market" system is that capitalism means the only reason to save another person from misery and devastation is if you are going to make some money. Cranick just had to learn the lesson is all, it was nothing personal, just following orders.
To stand idly by and watch a person's whole life be destroyed when it is in your power to stop it, to listen and not lift a finger while three dogs and a cats are burned to death right in front of you, this is the height of bullying. These are the people we've let put themselves in power.
And it is just one of a series of incidents, an epidemic of incidents of bullying across the board. Wall St.'s destruction of America is bullying. The battles over gay rights and abortion: basic bullying. Our foreign policy reduces down to US being the biggest meanest kid in the 5th grade over and over again.
Over and over again, the right-wing call for businesses to breathe free, free from the oppression of government's supposedly bullying regulations. Over and over the people looking out for our safety, our government, gets cast as a bully and we rally to condemn the bad old "gub'mint," then remove the cage we use to contain the wild beat we call the free market and every time we try this, it bites us in the ass. With the Treasury being Goldman- Sachs territory, and Wall Street and the insurance industry purchasing congressmen wholesale; everywhere you look bullies are shaping our commerce and every time you look, someone else is getting screwed.
And it's a vertical monopoly: Bullies Uber-Alles every time and everywhere. Our culture? Movies of violence or cruel comedy, television of barking political attack dogs and "reality TV" that banks on humiliation. Hate screamed rock and thugged up rap. The problem is, our society has evolved into a bully society, the intentional product of a bully brained government. This is in no way me trying to pretend this is some strictly recent aberration, or that America hasn't always been a bully.
Ask the Powhatan, the Algonquian, the Seminole, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Chinese, the Irish, the Hindi, the Black. Ask Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Korea. Sure, in foreign policy we have often been bullies and splendidly bastardly about it besides. Ask Mexico or ask the people of Guatemala what they think of the US right now that it's been revealed we once used their country as our own little secret real world STD experiment. And when we were too busy being bullies by ourselves, we trained others to do our bullying for us at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. School of the Americas. What a wonderful sounding name for a place that offers classes in anesthesia-free knee cap removal and comparative genital electro-conductivity.
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