Poosey Digest: The most wounded: our own children

Greetings from the Ridge.

Bullying. School age toughs who intimidate, teenage drama queens who harass, weird loners who yearn for attention. Sorry Charlie, but despite the recent press given this sad practice, it’s nothing new. If you went to public school anytime after Moses parted the Red Sea, you’ve seen bullying, experienced, and despite your rose-colored perspective might very well have participated in this oldest of adolescent games.

In fact, several of my friends in education tell me that at least in their schools, the bullying problem is probably less now than 20 years ago before we made its prevention a priority. It wasn’t long ago when "Kids will be kids" and "You can tough it out" were the extent of bullying education. Of course with the advent of cyberspace the bully’s potential audience is in the millions. Being humiliated on the Internet is a larger issue than having your drawers jerked down in front of your sweetheart in the Jr. High hallway.

Can we all agree on the premise that no one is born a bully? In the annals of medical history, there’s not a single case of a baby crawling out of his bassinet in the baby ward of a hospital and threatening the little tyke in the next crib. Bullying is learned. Period.

And is usually the case, we’re attacking the cure in all the wrong directions. As the comic strip character Pogo once famously intoned, "We have met the enemy and he is us." And our children are the victims.

Good Lord, just look what’s going on.

A Democrat daddy calls the Republican President an idiot, a Republican papa carries a signboard calling our nation’s chief executive the next Satan, then both are simply aghast when his little Johnny gets called into the office for name-calling.

A family gets all its news from the screaming headliners of cable news then is shocked when their little Suzie starts to stereotype her classmates instead of getting to know the facts.

We are spitting on Congressmen then bemoaning the fact that our public schools can’t teach our children more civility. We phone in death threats to members of Congress then scream for tighter security in schools when some misguided loner brings a gun to school. As our society becomes less civil we expect our children to somehow ignore everything they see, hear, and read, and suddenly become more reasonable than ourselves.

Few of us can escape blame.

Even teachers. A wise old school administrator once told me, "An insecure teacher will bad-mouth kids as soon as he gets out of the classroom. With a little more maturity he’ll wait `til she gets home to knock a student. If the teacher ever reaches maturity, he’ll realize that it’s his job to teach by example and he’ll just be quiet."

Even parents.

Little Johnny doesn’t perform up to par. The teacher is to blame, the other kids are to blame, the parents of the other kids get bad-mouthed at home. Meanwhile, Little Johnny doesn’t learn much about math but he’s just had a graduate course in bullying.

We’ve all seen children raised in homes with wise parents… moms and dads who are savvy enough to stop and try to understand another viewpoint, who think before they speak, who realize their every action is making a direct impression on the young ones around them. We’ve all had teachers and other adult leaders who set an example of tolerance and civility, and we know that when future problems press upon them, their students think back to "What would Mr. Johnson have done?"

Our old neighbor, John Upton, never got along with his own father. I have no idea what caused the disagreement, but when John’s kids were growing up they were pretty much instructed to ignore their grandpa. When his own kids grew up and left home they didn’t have any ill will against their father, but they seldom came to visit. They seldom called. John Upton died a lonely old man. Like it or not, he’d taught his kids a lesson in family love and without even knowing it, the kids learned their lesson well and accurately.

There have probably been two dozen TV specials and countless editorials written in the past few weeks about the victims of bullying. It’s too bad they’ve ignored the most wounded: our own children.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.