Unless you have had your head stuck in a toilet the past few days, you’ve probably heard about the elderly bus monitor who was horribly bullied by a bunch of teenaged hooligans and the video that has gone viral.
The video has served to enrage the public in general. If you don’t want to feel some measure of enragement, don’t watch it. I wasn’t going to, but it’s been in the media so much that I finally caved. I couldn’t watch the whole thing though.
The response to this video has garnered as much news coverage as the video itself. According to the last news release I saw, the fund set up to collect vacation donations for the lady had hit around half a million dollars. Clearly a nerve, or rather, countless nerves have been struck.
Another news report stated that the identity of a few of the hooligans had been leaked. They have gotten numerous death threats and are now at the receiving end of a society-wide bullying session. Somehow this horrifies me as well.
They are children. Children learn how to be bullies from others. Parents and adults in their lives have a responsibility to teach them how to treat others with respect and dignity. Yes, they are teens who have treated someone horribly. They should be disciplined. They should face consequences that lead to learning better behaviors and attitudes. Instead, they are being taught that when they screw up (and have they ever screwed up), the world will turn on them.
And what have we learned? Throw money at people to make them feel better (not that she shouldn’t be compensated somehow). Throw insults and threats at young people who screw up.
Clearly we are working together to build a better tomorrow.
Dirty Rotten Parenting 
The whole thing is surreal. I never ceased to be amazed by the battles people choose!
And how we manage to gather our armies!
Great points! The whole situation is a bit frightening….
Thanks for linking your post to mine. I love what you’ve said here and it’s so true. You are right they should be punished, but they are children. The backlash against the children is just like I said. The adults can’t even recognize their own bullying behavior. Somehow, someway, this bullying on all sides needs to stop. Again, thank you so much for the link to this post. Have an awesome day!
Maybe what we need is not anti-bullying as much as we need bullying awareness.
Amen 🙂
At least you are not getting the hate messages over your blog like I am. No worries, but man do I feel like I am swimming upstream!
It’s all in the approach! The benefit of blogland (or is it blogworld?) is that you can delete the bullies’ comments from your blog. At least, you should be able to.