Jeremy

[ericadawn16]

LiveJournal has been pushing October as Anti-Bullying month because I guess bullying doesn't happen the other eleven months of the year.

I know, I know, it doesn't mean that but it's still a little weird because we can talk about getting rid of bullying, but...

It isn't going to happen and even if it does, something else will come along to make life miserable. Life is a series of good and bad and you have to learn how to deal with that which is why I think there should be more pressure to teach people ways of dealing with those feelings in a positive way and what might work for them.

Now, I was bullied and made fun of a lot in seventh and eighth grade because thirteen year olds are assholes, but I knew I just had to get past middle school and I'd never see them again. Despite being a small town, I haven't seen them since. They picked on me because they had no future and that was their way of dealing with it.

I highly recommend Cameron Crowe's new documentary, Pearl Jam Twenty. Well, it's not for everyone but since I can still remember when Pearl Jam and Nirvana were new and my eldest brother loved them, I loved it. I also love Singles.

Comments

[lilferret]

Completely agreed. I went through the same thing.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

I think if adults stopped living in naive, idealistic "just tell Johnny how you feel" or "just walk away" bubble, bullying's effects wouldn't be as bad. I also think parents and teachers need to pay attention to bullying behavior that they reinforce every day. I saw it all the time at school and I see it now. I was in a class where every time there was a team, I got left out because my teacher repeatedly made the "five people only" mistake, and that was their golden opportunity to exclude me. I agree with the mentality that group work forces kids to work with people they don't like - that's probably a healthy thing to teach kids, and yeah, in adulthood you end up working with the same sort of people. Maybe they don't exclude you, but they don't want to do their part or they're catty or whatever. At the same time... if you know the kids in your class are leaving out certain people every time you assign teamwork or group work, you find a way to deal with it, the same way a (good) boss or manager would.

And parents need to be real too. You know what really upset me? When I saw all these parents on my friends list on FB telling their kids to "be nice to the nerdy kids this September." Not in those words, no, but... don't they realize that kind of shit just makes the bullying worse? The kids don't even know who they can actually trust, because they suddenly have two extremes - people who hate them and people who feel sorry for them. Unpopular kids aren't stray cats. And I see parents in the mall letting their kids trip old people and yell and... I dunno.

I guess it's just that when I hear about fighting bullying, I don't see any of those things being addressed, when to me those are the biggest issues. I don't understand why it's so hard to think about what it was really like when we were young and what actually might have worked.

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

But the thing with me and I bet a lot of other kids/teens are the same way...

I didn't tell anyone. I just accepted that they were going to be mean every single day and there was nothing I could do about it.

I do agree that a lot of bullying is learned at home. The kids in middle school weren't like that but I definitely encountered kids in high school and especially grade school that had no problems telling me how I was going to Hell for not going to church or other not so Christian things, even saying how my mom wasn't going to vote for the local Republican candidate.

Also, there's just a lack of empathy in general from the kids destroying stuff at Walmart while their parents watch to the people who can't understand why the people protesting can't just get a job.

[indiwise.livejournal.com]

They picked on me because they had no future and that was their way of dealing with it. - wise words!