A Never Ending Story that Must End

Tease - to irritate or provoke with persistent petty distractions, trifling raillery, or other annoyance, often in sport.

Bully - a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.

I was teased in elementary school. You go through life with the last name "Beaver" and you are going to get teased. I got called "Bucky" and people make chewing noises. I was constantly asked where Wally was. Once I got into high school, I think we can all figure out what the teasing was about. It wasn't always fun. But I learned a lot of lessons from that. I learned how to take the power away from someone by making a joke first. I attribute 90% of my sense of humor to learning that. Kids tease kids. Adults tease adults for the matter. Always have, always will.

I was bullied in high school. I was a chubby (fat) kid. A kid in my class told me constantly that I was going to blow up. I won't go into everything he did, but it was beyond teasing. It was bulling. It hurt. A lot. It made me cry. It made me sad. It made me want to hide in a shell and not go to school. I was scared to turn corners in the hallway in fear that he would be there. Kids bully kids. Adults bully adults. And I'm not naive enough to think it's going to ever totally stop.

We've moved into a communication age like never before. People can instantly tell the world their opinions and thoughts and current bladder status. They can also do it in relative anonymity. They can post pictures and videos taken with phones. They can do so in the blink of an eye, before giving the ramifications of their actions full thought. And sometimes the damage done is irreparable.

It's not easy being a parent now. We didn't grow up with Facebook and Twitter and texts and cell phones. Yeah, we know how to use them, but I'm not sure we know how to police them, and keep tabs on what our kids are doing on them. But we have to figure it out. We have to teach our kids about the consequences of actions. We have to teach our kids that the "beings" around them are HUMAN beings. They have feelings and thoughts and can be hurt, just like we can. We have to be the example to our kids. We have to look at our actions and how our kids see them. We can't just sit back and "hope" our kids turn out ok.

I'm sure you have heard about the young man at Rutgers who committed suicide after his roommate and a friend posted a video of the young man having sex with another man. I haven't read enough to know if this young man had already come out to his parents, or if this video "outted" him. I do know 2 things. He couldn't take the pain caused by that video being posted.... and the kids who did it had NO idea that their actions would cause this end reaction. But it did.

I think I'm rambling. Here... Ellen sums it up pretty well: