Bullying

I’m tired of hearing about it, frankly. Stop it. You know who you are. Eventually someone will kick you in the nuts and I hope I’m there to see it.

Our social awareness people – of whatever profession – have discovered bullying like a new continent or a baby’s hands or a teenage boy’s dick – they seem AMAZED and SHOCKED, SHOCKED that someone is being mean.

What I suspect is that there is a “bullying industry” has grown up around grants and Human Resource departments.

I am of two minds about this, as I am with most things. There has been bullying since the beginning of time and on through to today: Cain and Abel, Joseph and his nasty brothers, fascists of all eras, your tedious next door neighbor who paints “Fuck You” on your garage door. Most of the time, the bullies get their comeuppance, or the victims fight back, or everyone loses interest and moves on more or less intact.

The second bullying type (and the one that is showing up now and that actually worries me) is that there are some of our friends out there who are using “bullying” as a pejorative term for behavior they don’t approve of. They use it to describe political thought they disapprove of, or social behavior they don’t like and, when you call it “bullying” you give its prohibition an unassailable level of “rightness” that one should NOT argue with.

But either way, why are people who have been put in positions of authority so loathe to stop this behavior? I don’t remember much bullying at my schools. It must have happened, but why don’t I remember it?

There is the possibility, of course, that it was rare and punished quickly. I do remember a vigorous vice principal who ran endless laps after school with (mostly boys) students who had misbehaved.

So why would there be more worry about bullying now? Perhaps:

·      It happens more often because people in general are less well behaved.

·      It happens more often because bullies are not punished.

·      People are less able to police their own problems – maybe today’s bullies are meaner and more prone to violence.

·      There is money available for it’s study and treatment that was not available before, and so a sort of “bullying industry” has developed.

What I suspect…and this does not speak well of any of us…is that there is now infinite capacity for information distribution…and a constant need for content to fill it…and so a new topic comes into vogue to be discussed.

I am not sure this is a good thing. Making us all more aware of a problem that might or might not be more common guarantees that it will happen more.

As some statistician somewhere observed, “You get more of what you count.”

We are getting more bullies.