I viewed the following video this morning on Huffington Post and am sharing it, along with some insights here with you now.
Things to keep in mind as you view this video:
• The bus-monitor in this video is an adult who has volunteered to help keep order and peace on the bus. Presumably she is acting with the authority of the school and parents. Her testimony of events would carry a weight of credulity normally not assigned to an adolescent by adult authority figures.
• The woman on the bus possesses the emotional, psychological and spiritual development of an adult. She is a widow, a mother, a grandmother and has years of experience to help her cope with the assaults she suffers on this bus ride. A child or adolescent does not possess this experience, skill set, or adult level of development to help him/her cope with such a barrage of abuse.
• The woman on this video can quit in her role as a volunteer bus monitor and never have to endure this level of abuse again. A student must suffer this abuse twice per day, nine months of the academic year, throughout junior high school and high school years.
WARNING: This video contains offensive language and is disturbing to view. Unlike you, students are not free to “turn this off,” many endure similar treatment on a daily basis.
THE GOOD NEWS: You can do something to make a real difference.
Here are hyperlinks to various Anti-Bullying Organizations. Find out more information, become informed and personally involved. You can do this, you can make a difference, and you can be a voice for the voiceless now and in your community.
• Bully Police USA
• Bullying UK
• Bullying. No Way!
• Great Schools
• International Bullying Prevention Association
• National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP)
• National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP)
• National Bullying Prevention Center (A Project of PACER Center)
• Olweus Bullying Prevention Program
• PFLAG: Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesibians and Gays
• Schools Anti Bullying Web Gateway
• Stomp Out Bullying
• Stopbullying.gov
• Striving To Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere (STRYVE)
• Social Web Watch
3 comments:
$237,000 has been raised for her thus far. Let those 30 days of endorsement run some more, and I could see it climbing to $300k-400k. A nice sum for her retirement.
The beautiful thing she said is that, when asked why she kept doing it, she said "not all kids are bad".
Thank you for pointing out that for non-adults, this isn't voluntary torment.
I used to ride a bus like that, and the truth is, being in the Catholic Church these days kind of feels like being back on the middle-school bus. Because except for the obscenities, what really are those handsome young guys saying to that old woman that Zuhlsdorf and Arroyo and George and Rode their in-crowd aren't saying about the LCWR?
So, here we are again, stuck on the stupid, depressing bus, listening to the cool guys bash away at a pathetic old woman and there's not a thing anybody else can do about it. If you try to defend the old woman, you'll just be the punching bag yourself the rest of the day. The cool guys' friends will sure never say a word, they're just too thrilled to be in the cool crowd. The so-called adults aren't going to help, they'll just kind of laugh and say, oh, I suppose I'll have to have a talk with those guys, they're such cute, manly little fellows aren't they?
Basically, the problem is it's a sick system. Any society that allows snotty little boys to treat old women that way is terminally ill. You'll never learn anything in a school run by adolescent thugs like that. The best solution is just to drop out. There is a world elsewhere.
Dear Felapton,
I wholeheartedly empathize with all of your sentiments and your frustration. I think the principle difference between our childhood experience and the present reality, is the video camera.
Making people consciously aware of the raw emotional and physical violence is a very concrete first step towards changing that unjust reality.
As regards the various Catholic prelates you mentioned and their frontal assault on the religious women (nuns) who have championed the cause of the poor. I recall a book I read in post-graduate school. It was written by a KGB agent who defected to the West during the Cold War. He wrote of an incident that occurred after the Bolsheviks had seized power and were implementing revolutionary changes in the early 1920’s.
In Petrograd (St. Petersburg) there is a park with a monumental statue of Tsar Peter the Great. Three KGB agents attempted to seize and arrest a very elderly woman in the park, next to the statue. The old woman began to scream violently for help and a crowd began to draw in to assist her. The KGB agents noted the gathering angry crowd and ran away, leaving the old woman in freedom. That is what we must do, make lots of noise, draw lots of attention and these fiends will back off, because they are cowards engaged in injustice.
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