April 21 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace
See the documentary "Bully" and learn about this problem
Now playing at Louisville's Baxter Theaters
http://www.thebullyproject.com/
Here's a review of the film from the NY Times:
Behind Every Harassed Child? A Whole Lot of Clueless Adults
“Bully,”
Lee Hirsch’s moving and troubling documentary about the misery some
children inflict upon others, arrives at a moment when bullying, long
tolerated as a fact of life, is being redefined as a social problem.
“Just kids being kids” can no longer be an acceptable response to the
kind of sustained physical and emotional abuse that damages the lives of
young people whose only sin is appearing weak or weird to their peers.
And while
the film
focuses on the specific struggles of five families in four states, it
is also about — and part of — the emergence of a movement. It documents a
shift in consciousness of the kind that occurs when isolated, oppressed
individuals discover that they are not alone and begin the difficult
work of altering intolerable conditions widely regarded as normal.
The feeling of aloneness is one of the most painful
consequences of bullying. It is also, in some ways, a cause of it, since
it is almost always socially isolated children (the new kid, the fat
kid, the gay kid, the strange kid) who are singled out for mistreatment.
For some reason — for any number of reasons that hover unspoken around
the edges of Mr. Hirsch’s inquiry — adults often fail to protect their
vulnerable charges.
Alex, a 14-year-old in Sioux City, Iowa, whose daily
routine includes being teased, humiliated and assaulted (especially on
the school bus), cannot bear to tell his parents what is going on. He
even sticks up for his tormenters, who he says are “just messing around”
when they stab him with pencils and call him vile names.
“If not for them, what friends do I have?” he asks his distraught, confused mother.
It’s a heartbreaking moment. Equally sad — and also
infuriating and painfully revealing — is a scene in which an assistant
principal at Alex’s middle school tries to settle a conflict between two
boys who apparently had been fighting at recess. When she insists that
they shake hands, one eagerly obliges, with a smile and an apology. The
other sullenly resists, and as she scolds him for his noncooperation
(letting his antagonist go), it becomes clear that this boy is the
victim, and that the assistant principal’s rushed attempt to be fair is
in fact perpetuating a terrible and continuing injustice.
Later, after this same well-meaning, clueless
educator has similarly mishandled a meeting with Alex’s parents —
showing them pictures of her grandchildren; chirpily insisting that the
bus where Alex has been terrorized is “good as gold” — Alex’s mother
says “she politicianed us.”
There is more “politicianing” on display in “Bully”
than actual bullying, though Mr. Hirsch’s camera does capture a few
horrifying episodes (one of them so alarming that he shared it with
parents and school officials). In spite of its title, the film is really
about the victims, their parents and the powerful grown-ups who let
them down.
A school superintendent in Georgia denies that
bullying is a big problem in her district, in spite of the suicide of
Tyler Long, a 17-year-old student who took his life after enduring years
of harassment and ostracism. A sheriff in Yazoo County, Miss., tallies,
with dry, bureaucratic relish, the 45 felony counts faced by Ja’Meya
Jackson, a 14-year-old girl who pulled out a gun on a crowded school
bus. Nothing can justify such a crime, he says.
That may be true, but his insistence on a narrow,
legalistic understanding of Ja’Meya’s case betrays a profound lack of
concern about the sustained and systematic abuse that she experienced at
the hands of her schoolmates.
It gets worse. In a small town in Oklahoma, Ty
Smalley’s suicide left behind loving parents and a devoted best friend, a
self-described former bully whose insights are among the most accurate
and devastating in the movie.
After Kelby Johnson, a high school student in
another part of Oklahoma, came out as a lesbian, she and her family were
shunned by neighbors and former friends, and Kelby was taunted by
teachers as well as fellow students.
Mr. Hirsch weaves together these stories with
compassion and tact, and he wisely refrains from making scapegoats of
the bullies who cause Alex, Ja’Meya, Tyler, Ty and Kelby so much pain.
“Bully” forces you to confront not the cruelty of specific children —
who have their own problems, and their good sides as well — but rather
the extent to which that cruelty is embedded in our schools and
therefore in our society as a whole.
At times I found myself craving more analysis, a
more explicit discussion of how the problem of bullying is connected to
the broader issues of homophobia, education and violence in American
life. But those issues are embedded in every story the film has to tell.
Its primary intent is to stir feelings rather than to construct
theories or make arguments, and its primary audience is not middle-aged
intellectuals but middle-school students caught in the middle of the
crisis it so powerfully illuminates.
There is a little swearing in the movie, and a lot
of upsetting stuff, but while some of it may shock parents, very little
of it is likely to surprise their school-age children. Whose sensitivity
does the association suppose it is protecting? The answer is nobody’s:
That organization, like the panicked educators in the film itself, holds
fast to its rigid, myopic policies to preserve its own authority. The
members of the ratings board perform a useful function, but this is not
the first time they’ve politicianed us.
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