Chapter Eight. That's all you need to know: CHAPTER. EIGHT. The rest is prelude and epilogue, and while it might occupy you if you need something to read, you don't need it like you need Chapter 8.
I'm reading Jodee Blanco's Please Stop Laughing At Us... One Survivor's Extraordinary Quest to Prevent School Bullying. Ms. Blanco offers a stirring (although frequently wordy and sometimes garbled) memoir of relentless persecution by classmates beginning in elementary school and enduring all through high school. Her story is gruesome and at times so extreme as to be barely believable, except that we've all seen it, inflicted it or lived it.
Visit Blanco's excellent and attractive web site for information on her program, It's NOT Just Joking Around!, and by all means pick up her new book (I am NOT being compensated in any way for this review. Jodee Blanco doesn't know me from Adam. I feel very strongly about this issue), but if you don't have the inclination, merely bookmark this post because I'm going to give you the quick and dirty intro to her program right now.
Here we go.
"How often are you hanging out by the lockers with your friends when someone who you don't think is cool passes you in the hall? You and your friends look at each other and roll your eyes, perhaps even snicker. I know that you're not trying to be mean,' I explain. "You're just joking around, right?" Heads begin to nod. "Wrong!" I shout. "To that person, it's not just joking around. When you ridicule, bully, exclude, or ignore someone on purpose, treat that person as if you wish they didn't exist, you're damaging them for life," I exclaim."
...
"I thought things would be different [in high school]. There was this girl who let me sit at her table every day as long as I promised not to talk, to her or her friends. Can you imagine how hard that was? ...Then, one afternoon, one of them gets up and tells me that I can't sit there anymore. 'It's not like we hate you or anything,' she says. 'It's just that everybody else does, and we don't need them to start giving us a hard time too.' I begged them to reconsider, explaining that no one else would let me sit at their table. 'Look, Jodee, it's nothing personal.' I then began what would become the most humiliating journey of my life, going from table to table begging people to let me sit with them."
"Eventually I ran out of the cafeteria and into the bathroom and cried," I say. "But if a teacher had gone up to any of those kids and said, 'Hey, you guys, I just saw Jodee weeping in the lavatory, what did you do to her?' they would all have responded, 'We didn't do anything.' And they would have been telling the truth! Bullying isn't just the mean things you do," I say. "It's all the nice things you never do! Letting someone sit alone at lunch pretending not to see how badly that person wishes to be included? Bullying! Letting someone walk to class by themselves afraid to talk to anyone for fear of being rejected? Bullying! Always choosing the same person last whenever dividing into teams for gym or class? Bullying! It's all bullying!"
Recognize yourself in any aspect of this story? I'd be surprised if you didn't unless you were home schooled and even so -- who knows? maybe your mother was a bully.
Bullying is like psychological kudzu: we might never eliminate it, but we can fight like the dickens to control it. Whatever protection we can offer our children and each other will be better than what our parents and teachers offered us (not assigning blame here -- they did what they thought was right), which amounted to: "Ignore them. They're just jealous because you're so smart/talented/pretty/bipedal/straight haired/curly haired/bucktoothed..."
Blanco's most surprising, yet sensible, piece of advice is not to ignore bullies at all:
"Never ignore the bully and walk away. You must look the bully in the eye without any emotion or fear, command him to stop, and then stare him down just long enough to let him know you mean business. Next, begin walking away, and then turn briefly back toward him and say "See you later."... [S]tanding up for yourself nonviolently in the moment abuse occurs is your human right."
Thoughts anyone? If you had to choose a side, which would it be?
NOTE: According to Strollerderby, today marks the beginning of No Name-Calling Week.
That's a pretty good post. Yep, I was bullied, both in the passive and active sense, and yes, I'm afraid I have been guilty of passive bullying myself, not having the guts to stand up to the crowd. There is some little truth in the fact that everyone gets bullied to some extent, at some point in their life, and it's part of being human. For most people it's something to learn from and shrug off, but for those who were bullied as children, or bullied extensively, I agree that passive bullying is just as damaging as being actively picked on, and I'm ashamed of having been involved in that.
Posted by: jay | January 29, 2010 at 08:17 AM
Jay: I think many of us who have passively bullied (ignored) someone else have done it inadvertently, being so involved in our own thoughts and conversations that we don't notice someone sitting awkwardly alone at the next table. I agree that it's quite difficult to drum up the courage to defend someone who's being bullied; how many times have we all seen some parent whaling away at a child either physically or verbally and felt afraid to intervene?
Posted by: feefifoto | January 29, 2010 at 08:40 AM