sadI do not have a library card because I grew up poor—very, very, After-School Special poor, cockroaches in my bedroom and scavenging from trashcans poor—and I was badly bullied by the kids in my school, leading, eventually, to a group of girls stealing and destroying my library books. I couldn't pay the fines. I couldn't even tell anyone what had happened, because when the scruffy little poor girl complained about the sweet, well-groomed rich kids who had each others' backs, well...I had been down that road. The only people who would believe me were my mother and my teachers, and all I could do by telling them was upset them. I couldn't change anything.
I'm not that girl anymore. But the idea of getting a library card terrifies me, because some small, irrational part of me is convinced, incurably, that if I were to get a library card, those girls from school would show up, and slap my books out of my hands, and leave me standing alone on the sidewalk, sobbing over the loss of one of the things I loved most in the world: the ability to walk into a library with my head up, feeling like the books were free for anybody who wanted to read them.
The library books weren't the worst thing that happened to me during my school career. I was weird, I was geeky, I had frizzy hair and glasses and didn't really "get" a lot of the unspoken rules of the playground. I blew grade curves and didn't let people cheat off me on tests. I was basically invented to be the school punching-bag. But the library books were one of the things I never got over, because the library books taught me, once and for all, that sometimes the bullies win. Sometimes, you can't fight back, you can't stand up for yourself like the adults tell you to, and the bullies. Just. Win.
Phoebe Prince lost, too. But she's never going to be a grown-up, secure from bullies, writing a post like this one. Because she lost to the bullies so hard and so overwhelmingly that she killed herself.
Megan Kelly Hall is organizing YA authors against bullying, in memory of Phoebe Prince. Please. Go and read what she has to say. Consider what the current culture of bullying is doing to us, to our children, to our nieces and nephews, to the children of our friends. Even bullying that you survive can scar you forever, and Phoebe isn't the first to take her own life over this sort of thing. It's gotten so much worse than it was when I was in school, and I cried myself to sleep for years over the bullying.
This needs to stop. We need to stop it.
Please.
April 20 2010, 01:15:57 UTC 7 years ago
My mother was odd. She took an interest in my school activities, became involved in the arts booster group for parents, even applied our stage make up in the shows. And she gave me expensive presents, so I knew she cared. But for most of my childhood and teenage years, she did things but never said words of praise or love. When I became an adult, we reached a sort of peace. And then she got dementia, and became helpless, and when my father died I took her under my wing and cared for her the best I could, dutifully, but always with some mixed feelings.
Seems to me, kids who bully do a lot of harm without knowing what they’re doing. Nether they nor their victims are done baking yet. I feel sorrow and solidarity for Phoebe, and yet I’m uncomfortable with the calls for manslaughter charges and prison sentences for the kids who participated in driving her to her death. I want those kids to learn from this, to grow, and to be accountable in a way that gives causes them real remorse and thought and the resolution to be better people. Put them in the criminal justice system now, and they’ll come out criminals for life.
The ones I want to see on trial are the teachers and administrators and maybe some parents, who knew what was happening, and who looked the other way or enabled the bullying. Because they are old enough to know better. Because their duty was to act in loco parentis. They were supposed to be protecting the children as if they were their own. They were supposed to supervise. They were supposed to make the school a smaller, more civilized, more perfect model society than the less perfect adult world on the outside. And they failed with, it seems to me, a criminal negligence.
April 21 2010, 19:28:53 UTC 7 years ago
You have much more compassion for bullies than I did... or still do.
I guess the wounded 15-year-old girl in me, who only failed where Phoebe succeeded, wants... revenge. Even vicariously.
That girl wants bullies to *pay*... and it's very difficult for the 38-year old me to not indulge her.
April 21 2010, 21:46:03 UTC 7 years ago
Those thoughts aren't wrong, it seems to me. You became an Ironrose warrior. You can fight evil on its own terms, now. There's so much to admire in that. You deserve to be strong and confident, after the pain you've been through.
I have one of those gifts that doubles as a curse, in that I can't stop myself from seeing the other person's side. It's great for when compassion is needed, but it makes me not all that effective as a warrior. Sometimes the evil just needs to be clobbered, preferably by someone like you, who they might mistake for helpless, only to find out that you're not helpless any more.