By now, anyone who watches network news or any news of any sort, will have seen the video of the bus monitor by heckled and abused by the three teenagers. The video went viral on YouTube and was an absolutely disgusting display of bad behavior by three male teenage miscreants. This was bullying taken to an extreme level.
Bullies make me sick anyway but in a school setting or school bus setting, more typical bullying behavior (I thought) was among a peer group. Stupid bullies picking on other kids and making their lives miserable because of size, weight, clothing, whatever perceived difference there is that makes the bullies feel entitled to be cruel. Maybe this bad phenomena of bullying is even worse than we thought, there just hasn’t been a stupid enough bully yet to (1) video the attack and (2) proudly post it to YouTube!
The female bus monitor who was the target of the bullying assault was 68 years old. These teenagers verbally abused her for more than 10 minutes and felt free to attack her on many fronts. Nothing was spared. They must have felt so brave being so cruel in front of their schoolmates. They even taunted her about her adult son who had committed suicide.
The other kids on the bus did nothing. Nothing! No doubt one reason is self-preservation, they don’t want to be the next target. Don’t they understand that until someone risks that outcome, this type of savagery continues. In my opinion, these three boys not only should face criminal charges and consequences but should be publicly condemned and shunned by the village. Non violent societies often would settle atrocious behavior from their neighbors by absolute shunning and casting out those who behaved so badly.
Can you believe there is a silver lining to this disturbing story? Since the video was out in the public domain, millions of people commented…some just with words and others personally responded with videos of themselves doing exactly what villagers of yesterday would have done, publicly condemned the boys for their behavior. Social media is a double edged sword, sometimes I think it is pulling away our “humanity” and other times I think it might be restoring it. These boys’ “peers” around the world did exactly what the other kids on the bus didn’t dare do, told these punks in the most public of forums that their behavior was unacceptable.
Two other silver linings of note. The father of one of the boys instead of shielding himself and his family behind a “no comment”, chose to also publicly condemn his son for this shocking behavior. I know he still loves his son and acknowledging his son’s participation in this act of cruelty was probably one of the most painful things he’s ever done…next to admitting to the world his utter disappointment in his own child. The other silver lining is the gentleman who started a campaign to raise money to send the bus monitor on a vacation and to show her moral support. He had hoped to raise $5,000 and when I went to bed last night, the tally so far was $300,000. The strength of social media restoring humanity.
Bullying is always absolutely disgusting behavior and it doesn’t matter whether it is on a school bus, boardroom, bedroom or real estate negotiation. Leslie and I talked a lot about it and hope this woman’s pain serves the greater purpose of honest conversation about all of us having the strength to speak up, even if our voice shakes and put a stop to bullying of all sorts, blatant like this situation or subtle like the use of slurs against any ethnicity, gender, age, weight or handicap status during normal conversations. We should be better than this.
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