Bullying Op Ed

Bullying

Through the tears pouring down her eyes she gazed down at the lifeless body that looked blankly back at her. The body was pasty white and his lips were blue due to loss of body heat. There was also a hole in his temple and a pistol next to his body. The body belonged to her son who had committed suicide hours earlier. It was approximately six in the morning when she found him in the woods a quarter mile away from her house; he had went missing the night before and local authorities had been notified and they found him lying there, dead. This young man had been bullied to such an extent that he felt that suicide was the only tangible escape. He was a son, a scholar and also one of my friends.

                Having to be forced to experience the loss of one of my friends, I reflected on my past and how I had been portrayed as a bully. I was a chubby fourth grade student and I had honed the ability to eat a powdered donut in one bite and chase it down with a vat of gravy. I outweighed the majority of the school by approximately fifty pounds and even had a couple pounds advantage over some of the teachers. This meant that I was not someone that was messed with very often. I used my large stature and even larger ego as my main tools in inflicting my wrath upon the other students. I would body slam and verbally harass anyone and everyone that I pleased, and I loved it because it made me feel less insecure about my large belly. Verbal harassment was my choice of degradation against others because I had the ability to sound like I was saying something horrible and hurtful, when in reality I would spit out a plethora of large words that no one knew the meaning of. It was until one day my dad caught wind of my verbal harassment problem at school and told me, “It’s not what you say to someone, it’s how they perceive what you are saying to them.”

                Perception plays a very significant role in our lives. It determines how we absorb information and how we react to it. What’s going through someone’s head when they’re being bullied? How are they going to handle the bullying in a manner that will make them feel alleviated of the hurt that’s been inflicted on them? It’s safe to say that no one can guarantee how someone is going to react to bullying, and that strikes me as very hazardous because the inability to know how someone is going to react to bullying is like playing with a ticking time bomb. Some people have the ability to laugh it off and brush it off their shoulder, but others may take more drastic measures to deal with their anguish caused by bullying. Some of those drastic measures may include violence, lack of social interaction with others and sometimes even attempts of suicide.

                Being a bully is empowering, I mean, there is nothing like taking a kid half your size and stuffing him into a trash can. Priding yourself on your donut eating ability is really something to gloat about also. What would you rather want, a trustworthy friend that you can depend on, or a friend that can shovel a whole bakery into his mouth on command? Obviously you’re going to take option number two. What I think would be the best though, is the phone call you would receive from a parent of a fellow student you had bullied, and listen to the parent tell you that their son/daughter had just committed suicide because of a bullying problem they had at school.

                Bullying is an inevitable factor in our everyday lives, unfortunately. There is always going to be name-calling, violence and those stupid commercials about cyber bullying trying to stop bullies that no one pays attention to. It seems like such a simple concept, being nice to each other. Without bullying there wouldn’t be as many suicide attempts among children and young adults. There wouldn’t be stressed out parents worrying about their kids being safe at the local school. All people would have to do is think about how the other person is going to perceive what is being said to them.