Antoinette Tuff can teach us about bullying
By now, most schools have started a new year.
For a lot of kids, August means seeing friends after a summer apart, putting together new outfits, cracking open fresh notebooks and figuring out who they’re going to be that year.
For others, though, it means bracing for the teasing, bullying and shattered self-esteem they’re sure to face at the hands of other students. Maybe these bullied kids went through the summer hoping that, by the start of the next year, everyone would forget how much fun it was to torture them. Maybe they think if they wear the right clothes, lose some weight, get tougher-skinned, they’ll be left alone.
And then they learn that even if they feel they’ve changed, their peers did not. Depending on their age, they might have even gotten more cruel.
Like mass gun violence, bullying is a persistent problem in America’s schools, and one that, like gun violence, we can’t get it together enough to solve. It’s so much easier to find someone to blame and criticize, and then wait for the blamed party to immediately defend themselves. And then, of course, hoist the blame somewhere else so that that party can jump to the defense. Around and around it goes.
By now, we can dissect many factors that probably contribute to rampant bullying. There are the parents who teach their kids to be entitled brats who can do no wrong, or who teach their kids — implicitly or explicitly — to “bully or be bullied.”
There are also teachers who turn away from it when it happens, or Facebook, or the damaged self-esteem of all kids who witness more advertisements than any other generation telling them what to look like, or how to be.
There is also just plain old sociopathy, maybe, or the lack of a mature framework through which to look at the world.
So, what’s the solution? Well, most likely, there isn’t one.
Not an easy one, anyway. The likely answer is compassion. One thing that would definitely kill bullying is if we could inject all middle and high school kids with the ability to mentally step into the shoes of another. But compassion is not easily applied, or easily taught. And we can’t easily heap our anger and blame on an abstract lack of compassion like we can with video games, teachers, parents, guns.
By now you’ve probably heard about Antoinette Tuff, an elementary school bookkeeper who talked down a young man armed with an AK-47 — helped keep him from taking his gun into the classrooms.
“We all go through something in life,” Tuff told the gunman.
And when he decided to give up his weapon and lie on the floor of the front office so that the cops could arrest him, she told him she loves him, that’s she’s proud of him for doing the right thing. They were two disparate people: one, a young white man, the other, a middle-aged black woman. Yet, Tuff was able to connect with him. She recognized a person in pain. She told him about her own pain and encouraged him by her own example that he can overcome it.
Tuff is a special person, who found herself in extraordinary circumstances. That interaction could have gone a hundred other ways, but it went the best way possible — no one injured, no one killed, and now the 20-year-old will get the mental help he sorely needs.
How do we communicate Tuff’s message of compassion to kids? Yes, parents can teach it. But then the kids must also overcome all the noise outside of their parents’ reach. The current environment of our schools — really, our country in general — does not favor compassion. It favors self-preservation and looking out for yourself first. And what better way to look out for yourself than to bully others before they can bully you?
The same “pick yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude that infects our attitudes about poverty, hardship, prejudice and safety also influences the way our kids navigate through school.
It’s all related.
I’m not saying it’s hopeless. We owe it to our kids to figure something out. Maybe Antoinette Tuff’s example is a good place to start.