It's the face on the homepage that's haunting me today- the cherubic face framed by dark, lustrous hair, given a hint of mischievousness by a slight, Mona Lisesque smile... The coverage of the suicide of South Hadley, Massachusetts teen Phoebe Prince indicates that she had been the subject of a cruel bullying campaign on the part of her classmates. Most of the ink and electrons spell out the story of a hounded young woman, and pose questions regarding the presence, knowledge, and activities of the adults who were in positions to address the bullying. I would simply add an exhortation to all adults to constantly harp on the fact that death is final- a suicide is irrevocable, and young people have to navigate perilous waters at best, what with automobile accidents, violent attacks, and illness. Where there's life, there's hope, and this young woman, whose situation seemed so hopeless to her, should have been told that the tumult in which she had been ensnared could have been left behind, that the cruel cliques of high school would seem inconsequential once she had graduated, and moved out of the small, scummy pond of her hometown high school. I lost high school friends to car accidents, to cancer, and to the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing- death is all-pervasive, it gets us all in the end, it gets some of us entirely too young, there's no need to help it.
Jonathan Richman perhaps put it best, with all his goofy-earnestness, in his song Dignified and Old, recorded with the Modern Lovers. Hey, kids, don't die, the deck is stacked against you, but don't just throw in your hand:
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7 comments:
terrible.
Yeah, I really had to write something after seeing that picture- what a horror.
I read that Slate article at work, also saw the comments.
It's so darned sad, and yeah, fucking evil teenagers. But really, is the answer to this locking up a bunch of kids in jail for ten years?
The comments said yes. Eye for an eye, beaches!
Am I wrong to think this is taking a tragedy and raising it to the ³² power?
~
No, society doesn't lock up the kids, but there's a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done regarding parental supervision of minors.
The whole thing makes me want to holler- if there's one thing I could never stand, it's a bully, and I was never really on the receiving end (although, when I was six, I went after a neighbor about three or four years older than me because he was tormenting the effeminate kid who lived across the street, and got a sprained ankle for my efforts when the a-hole knocked me down).
I WAS on the receiving end, for a while. It started to taper off in HS, although there was one guy...
Anyway, locking up bullies isn't the answer, obviously. but the people who run the school have to stop looking the other way. It seems like so often it's dismissed, because it's just the popular people 'blowing off steam' and the victims are the fringe characters, so the power structure sees little gain in defending them.
But eventually something like this happens, and not only the bullies, but the adults who abet the behavior are exposed as the acolytes of privilege they are.
I was on the receiving end for 4 years... 5th-8th. It would come and go, I was not always the target, but seemed to get most of it... I had more or did better in school or who knows. I was told it was a right of passage... to shake it off... My mother did step in many times, but things never followed through and of course, there was no leaving the school, the church...
The thing I remember the most? Not the broken arm, not the fear or the misplaced shame... what I remember most was parochial school teachers not helping, and at times, telling me I must have done something wrong for God to be punishing me.
I found out years later that one of the teachers who always took the side of the bully, was actually molesting her... along with others. I had a little more compassion for my nemesis.I had at least been spared that, but I was still collateral damage.
Grrrr... RITE of passage!
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