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Several well-known incidents of people harassing others who later kill themselves has made “bullying” a hot topic. Maybe we are getting meaner as a culture but before we can even contemplate that question, the discussion is being turned to serve political agendas. Presto-change-o and an amazing number of things are being called bullying.
Of course it’s a tragedy when a tormented young person kills himself. It’s tragic for a family and a community, just as the suicide often intends. Add contemptible opportunism to tragic and you have the recent story of a 19-year-old Oklahoma man.
Zach Harrington has become a cause for the leftist agenda in our part of the country. He took his own life after attending a late-September city council meeting in Norman, Okla. Some reported that the things he heard during a four-hour debate “may have pushed him over the edge.”
The council meeting in question was a public discussion over whether Norman should let its freak flag fly by declaring October “Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender History Month.” The declaration praised the “achievements” of GLBT groups that “promote understanding, acceptance, and equality” for GLBT individuals. The college town is also said to benefit from the “many GLBT citizens who own businesses within the City.” Doubtless there are many other groups within Norman that share behavioral or niche commonalities, many of them larger and thus better subjects for a resolution. Many of those groups contain productive citizens who own businesses also. But there was an agenda in the choice of GLBT citizens. What they have in common is a selection of abnormal sexual behaviors. That and the intense desire to have their behavioral interests called normal by cities where it is decidedly not normal. That agenda was where several community members saw the need to speak up.
After reading many comments that blamed the debate for this young man’s death, I was curious regarding what was actually said. Video clips of testimony, chosen by a GLBT advocacy group, showed the comments of six citizens, the worst of the lot. But they were soft-spoken, respectful, affirming of diversity, and used not one single offensive term to describe those with whom they disagreed. One man did offer a mild rebuke at council members who couldn’t help mugging for the audience every time a conservative spoke against the resolution, but that was it. And these were the worst comments liberal news sites could find to quote. I should point out here that Mr. Harrington was in no way the focus of the resolution or of those who did not favor it. No one called him names or used his name as best I can tell. He was simply an observer. After “listening” to the testimony, the council did as I expect they came determined to do; they voted 7-1 to be silly and disrespectful of their constituents.
The conservatives who became the focus of the later discussion on bullying did disagree with the resolution, and their reasoning included concerns about what negative results might follow the council’s effort to normalize an anti-family behavior. That opposition, the very fact of that opposition, has been called harsh, harmful, slander, toxic, hateful, and of course, bigoted. If we are to follow the reasoning of some commentators, one I read was a Baptist pastor, the claim of some Normanites that the Bible was their guiding light in opposing the resolution contributed to the suicide of a 19-year-old man.
Let’s go back a little further to the discussion surrounding the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. Sure, there were screamers; the hysterical you have with you always. But even those who made a very reasonable, “Of course we should not forbid the building of an otherwise legal mosque, but it should not, for sake of wisdom and courtesy, be built here” statement were said to engage in overblown, hateful rhetoric. And, as in the Norman event, the mere act of disagreeing is enough to force some to craft overblown rhetoric against overblown rhetoric.
There is real bullying, I know. Nearly everyone remembers that miserable kid from childhood who seemed to loom around every corner to taunt or abuse. It’s not fun and the fact that it’s common doesn’t make it normal. There have always been kids whose homes are dark dungeons of depravity. I think that is more common with each passing year. Experts on the subject say that incidents of violence and intimidation are on the rise, and that some of the bullies now are popular kids who just don’t know how to related to other people without dominating or objectifying them.
A home that has real monsters, or even mere morons, in charge will produce little monsters worse than their mentors. It is fitting that the caretakers of our children, in every context, should correct the cruel children of abusive, neglectful, and missing parents. None of us should stand by while the pack tortures a kid they’ve singled out. Most of us know by common sense the difference between a smart aleck comment and relentless torment. This is a real problem that becomes a casualty of efforts to co-opt the term in service of unrelated agendas.To whom do we trust a definition of the problem, though? Groups of people with common sense almost always become a committee or institution with none at all. What blunt instrument of regulation or “zero tolerance” policy will we implement to address the problem? The institutions that start with the safety of school kids as their concern end up suspending a boy who brings an inch-high, rubber gun-wielding toy soldier to school in his backpack. Dearborn, Mich. begins by trying to nurture peaceful communities and morphs the intent into handcuffing Christian students for having a quiet discussion of religion with a group of young Moslems. A country willing to accept peace at the price of chains and slavery forbids preachers from quoting Romans 1:27. Pardon me if I’m a little leery of letting petty bureaucrats find the difference between free speech and disturbing the peace. If a soft-spoken housewife can’t speak to a city council meeting without being accused of pushing a young man to suicide, the conversation is not in safe hands.
Maybe it’s an example of the undisciplined way our people often think. All the things that upset me are not part of the same trend. Not everyone who frustrates me is part of the same conspiracy. To think otherwise is to make every issue like a piece of legislation insiders call a “Christmas Tree.” The term refers to a bill that includes all manner of disparate riders and amendments. If our nation can’t talk about the increasing meanness of our culture and its children without every aspect of public discussion being thrown into the pot, we’ve lost the ability to speak English to one another.
This confusion seems intentional, cynical, and opportunistic. Pragmatic advocates of one thing or another glom onto every issue that gets any press with little regard for pertinence. It is detrimental to any serious discussion between people with clear and honest but specific disagreements. To call a very appropriate city council debate “bullying” or a disagreement regarding a provocative building project “overblown” dissipates our ability to productively talk about civil speech or a minimal level of tolerance.
A second problem with this melding of all issues into one is the inability to address important questions such as the nature of families or public morality. Those who take an unpopular viewpoint may be shouted down with any old epithet that’s handy. The easy answer is to censor by means legal or sentimental those who hold the more traditional position.
Instead of letting someone’s revisionist definition of civil conversation or gentle speech suck all the oxygen out of the room, let’s occasionally give due respect to the subject actually at hand. Maybe
