Point That Finger Into the Mirror
I read this article this morning:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_bullying_one_town
"The younger generation doesn't care if someone is gay," I hear. "They don't care if someone is 'different.' They're very accepting." I'm sure that for many young people this is true. Too often, though, it is not true (once, after all, is too often). For these four children, for the numerous other recently-publicized suicides, and for too many others, it wasn't how they perceived their experiences at all. And now they're dead.
The impulse to Belong and to "prove" our Belonging by being cruel to Those Who Do Not Belong is a normal part of growing up. But then, so are such impulses as hitting, biting, not sharing, and throwing tantrums. The normality of these impulses does not mean we have to tolerate our children's acting upon them. In fact, learning how to manage--rather than to indulge--these impulses is a not merely normal but also vital part of maturing into a member of a civilized society. Children should start figuring this out by the age of three or four and should have it well mastered by high school. But they won’t learn it on their own.
Where do our children learn that cruelty and hatred and the dehumanization of those different from themselves are acceptable? They learn from us. We as parents, teachers, coaches, media figures, politicians, uncles and aunts, clergy, etc. teach them this.
We can not abdicate our own responsibility to teach our children how to be civilized human beings and then wonder why they are not civilized human beings. We can not sit idly by and then wonder why the schools aren't teaching children these things that school curricula should not have to teach them. If a child has not learned basic empathy by the age of sixteen, I don't think any school assembly for "Citizenship Day" is going to fix that.
Sadly, the problem is not limited to our abdication of our responsibility to teach our children empathy. Worse, we are actively teaching them cruelty, hatred, and dehumanization. Every time any one of us in the adult generations speaks of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered people, or Muslims, or Mexican immigrants, or "the poor," or African-Americans, or liberals, or conservatives, or whoever the bugbear-du-jour might be as a "They" or a "Them" to be feared and mistrusted and hated, and every time any of us LISTENS to someone who says these things and buys into what the person is saying, we are teaching our children to draw these lines between Those Who Belong and Those Who Do Not Belong. We are teaching them that their adolescent cruelty toward Those Who Do Not Belong is not only acceptable, but also laudable. We're showing them that they don't have to control that impulse or to grow out of indulging that cruelty, because we're showing them that we haven't grown out of it ourselves.
It is not for the schools to fix that problem alone--though surely there are better corrective and protective measures they could employ, too. It's up to all of us to fix that problem. This one is on us--on ALL of us, whether we are ourselves parents or not.
Yes, there have always been and will always be young people who do and say mean-spirited things. Yes, there have always been and will always be some young people who take their own lives. But as long as we go on modeling hatred and abdicating our responsibility to teach the younger generation empathy for their fellow humans--all the while wringing our hands and lamenting that the schools aren't doing our jobs for us--we are making a bad problem worse and we may as well be lynching these children for being gay (or Croatian, or learning disabled, or anything else that brands them as Other) ourselves.
Oh, and while we fret (understandably) about cruelty and hatred and dehumanization of others from our children, we mustn't forget to confront these traits in our own hearts. We can hack at the branches of the weed all we want, but until we yank the weed up by its roots it will only grow back.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_bullying_one_town
"The younger generation doesn't care if someone is gay," I hear. "They don't care if someone is 'different.' They're very accepting." I'm sure that for many young people this is true. Too often, though, it is not true (once, after all, is too often). For these four children, for the numerous other recently-publicized suicides, and for too many others, it wasn't how they perceived their experiences at all. And now they're dead.
The impulse to Belong and to "prove" our Belonging by being cruel to Those Who Do Not Belong is a normal part of growing up. But then, so are such impulses as hitting, biting, not sharing, and throwing tantrums. The normality of these impulses does not mean we have to tolerate our children's acting upon them. In fact, learning how to manage--rather than to indulge--these impulses is a not merely normal but also vital part of maturing into a member of a civilized society. Children should start figuring this out by the age of three or four and should have it well mastered by high school. But they won’t learn it on their own.
Where do our children learn that cruelty and hatred and the dehumanization of those different from themselves are acceptable? They learn from us. We as parents, teachers, coaches, media figures, politicians, uncles and aunts, clergy, etc. teach them this.
We can not abdicate our own responsibility to teach our children how to be civilized human beings and then wonder why they are not civilized human beings. We can not sit idly by and then wonder why the schools aren't teaching children these things that school curricula should not have to teach them. If a child has not learned basic empathy by the age of sixteen, I don't think any school assembly for "Citizenship Day" is going to fix that.
Sadly, the problem is not limited to our abdication of our responsibility to teach our children empathy. Worse, we are actively teaching them cruelty, hatred, and dehumanization. Every time any one of us in the adult generations speaks of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered people, or Muslims, or Mexican immigrants, or "the poor," or African-Americans, or liberals, or conservatives, or whoever the bugbear-du-jour might be as a "They" or a "Them" to be feared and mistrusted and hated, and every time any of us LISTENS to someone who says these things and buys into what the person is saying, we are teaching our children to draw these lines between Those Who Belong and Those Who Do Not Belong. We are teaching them that their adolescent cruelty toward Those Who Do Not Belong is not only acceptable, but also laudable. We're showing them that they don't have to control that impulse or to grow out of indulging that cruelty, because we're showing them that we haven't grown out of it ourselves.
It is not for the schools to fix that problem alone--though surely there are better corrective and protective measures they could employ, too. It's up to all of us to fix that problem. This one is on us--on ALL of us, whether we are ourselves parents or not.
Yes, there have always been and will always be young people who do and say mean-spirited things. Yes, there have always been and will always be some young people who take their own lives. But as long as we go on modeling hatred and abdicating our responsibility to teach the younger generation empathy for their fellow humans--all the while wringing our hands and lamenting that the schools aren't doing our jobs for us--we are making a bad problem worse and we may as well be lynching these children for being gay (or Croatian, or learning disabled, or anything else that brands them as Other) ourselves.
Oh, and while we fret (understandably) about cruelty and hatred and dehumanization of others from our children, we mustn't forget to confront these traits in our own hearts. We can hack at the branches of the weed all we want, but until we yank the weed up by its roots it will only grow back.