The Scarlet "B"

South Hadley Holds Meeting About Teen's Suicide

The small town of South Hadley is wrestling with a very big problem. A problem blamed for the suicide death of a teenaged girl. "Our lives have changed," said resident Carol Constant. "As we know it, South Hadley is a different community."

A large crowd turnout out for the regularly scheduled selectmen's meeting, but they didn't want to talk about budget concerns. "I saw the sun come up this morning, Phoebe didn't," said Joe Marois.

It's a tragic story, no question about it. A young girl, tormented by others for being "different", finally succumbs to the pressure and takes what she thinks is the only way out. A family is devastated, a young life extinguished for no good reason, a tortured soul driven to extremes by uncaring peers. It plays out across America in small towns and big cities alike; the well-to-do every bit at risk as the middle and lower class. Any time it's viewed as acceptable to ridicule those different than us - and Rahm Emmanuel proved recently that even the so-called tolerant left isn't immune from this temptation - someone will push it too far, and someone else will suffer.

I take odds with this idea, though:

"These are the individuals that need to wear a yellow smock that says bully on it and be escorted from class to class," he said.

First off, the sheer manpower needed to escort anyone accused of bullying is staggering. Secondly, I was bullied in grammar school. Most of the kids who did the bullying would have worn the yellow smock as a badge of honor akin to gang colors. Hell, most of the group would have fallen over themselves pushing younger kids into mud puddles just to get the smock and thus be seen as the "tough kids" that people should fear. Identifying the bullies in a public manner gives them the power they so desperately seek.

Offering this idea as a solution shows the true problem - a profound lack of understanding of bullying in general and bullies in specific. Kids aren't going to stop bullying other kids because they're afraid of public notice; quite the opposite. Typically kids bully out of their own low self esteem and a burning desire to pull the other guy down to make themselves look better by comparison - hence why the geeks/nerds/band members etc. are frequent targets. Giving the bullies the notoriety of a special class - which is what a yellow jersey and a special escort amounts to - is exactly what they want most in life.

There's also a striking lack of ideas on what to do *outside* the classroom - while keeping a constant watch on the offenders during school hours might prevent bullying during school hours, the kids are only in school for ~ 7 hours of the day. There's after school activities, online events, and social situations - both school sanctioned and not - where bullying can occur. The school may be able to punish bullies for actions on school grounds or at school events, but try punishing a kid for something they wrote at home and posted to Facebook on their own time. The ACLU would rightly have a field day.

What can we do about it then? Sadly, there's little we can do to stop the bullies. In my own case, it took achieving a height of 6', a weight of 220 pounds, and a daily regimen of lifting weights before the torment stopped. For others, the self-confidence brought on by following the martial arts is frequently enough to deter a bully - they look for the weak and the timid, and a brown belt with the knowledge and confidence to block, par, and return blows is likely to be left alone. The bullies themselves tend to be a self-correcting problem, as even in this day and age random acts of violence are rarely tolerated outside of school halls.

Rest in Peace, Phoebe. My heart breaks for the senseless loss of your life, for your family who have to soldier on in your absence, for all those who suffer at the hands of the bullies. We can't all be the beautiful people. We can't all be rich and afforded all of life's advantages. Sadly, there are still those who place an inordinate amount of worth on what one owns or what kind of power one has rather than what someone is like inside. I doubt we'll ever see that time as long as human beings are, well, human.

The biggest lesson I take from this is that I need to make sure I remain as involved as I possibly can in my kids' lives.

That is all.