The Power of Love, Overcoming the Love of Power
You are walking down a hall at school and suddenly you see a kid get shoved against his locker by a group of upperclassmen. Instead of stepping in, you, like most people, look the other way and keep on walking by. Just because you weren’t the one acting as the bully, does it make it okay for you to just watch and let it happen? Bullying has affected everyone in some way or another. A student has either watched another person get picked on, was the victim, or acted as the bully.
It’s an act people have unfortunately come to accept as a part of growing up. Teachers start to look the other way when kids are being targeted because they just don’t know what to do anymore. It’s become an act a lot of adults aren’t sure how to handle or deal with. “Kids will be kids”, an aphorism most adults will say to downplay the destructive role it has on their students. For this reason,awareness needs to be educated in all schools in order to cease bullying.
If we know how it feels like to be bullied and victimized, why do we still do it? We allow jealousy and hate to control our lives. We let it create us into monsters. We allow it to hurt people who did nothing to harm us. A student in kindergarten is given a piece of paper with differing objects on it. He is then asked to cross out what doesn’t belong. From a young age we are taught to not accept things that are different.
As a result, is bullying really our fault? Or did we sadly grow up in a society where we remove people who are different from the norm? Consequently, we spend a lot of time putting people into categories,branding them with names: geeks, jocks,etc. For instance, the guy being told he has no future and being called a “pothead” may only smoke in order to deal with his alcoholic father abusing his mother in front of him when he’s home. The geek everyone enjoys making fun of might be on the verge of suicide because of all the neglect he gets from home and at school. This list can continue but at the end of the day you don’t really know any of the people you constantly talk and gossip about. A study in Britain found that at least half of suicides among young people are related to bullying.
Everyone is fighting their own personal battle and as a school we should be there for one another instead of bringing each other down. Not everyone is going to be best friends with each other but there needs to be a level of respect with one another. As Jimi Hendrix said, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace”. This goal is achievable with the assistance from schools everywhere to bring awareness to the destructiveness of bullying.
