DemonAbyss10 wrote:
I already decided a while back to try not to reproduce, I consider it immoral to bring another life into existence because of the fact that that life will have to put up with so much BS.
I hope you change your mind. Yes, it IS an awful world we live in. But at the same time, we can teach our own children to deal decently with other people and help out their friends.
Something that bothers me about our culture (and the culture of bullying) is that we are taught to "mind our own business." But the truth is that the business of one person is the business of everyone, which means an entire community is affected--not just the poor girl who killed herself and her family, but the school (even though they won't be charged with anything, it's still a stain on them), the bullies themselves and THEIR families, and everyone else by extension.
I was bullied a lot throughout school, and I learned a few things from that. When I was on Ritalin, I got really aggressive and took up the attitude that I didn't care if I got hurt/killed. So the big kids that "owned" the school would push me around and I'd push back. I remember a couple of fights when I did some real damage to some of those "hard" types. But I was also smart enough to figure out that behavior wouldn't be tolerated, so I learned how to defuse situations or avoid them altogether. If there was a confrontation looming, I just made sure I was in the right place at the right time so that a teacher couldn't ignore what was happening. That got me through high school without having to prove anything.
So when I heard about those suburb school shootings (I was in college by this point), I wasn't a bit surprised. What I couldn't figure out is how those incidents even made it to the news headlines.
And that's when I figured out something else: I'll always have people who push me around and there's nothing I can do about it without taking a fall. Someone will always judge me for doing what I feel is right. But MAYBE I can keep a friend from being abused. I was talking with a girl once who told me how badly her boyfriend treated her (REALLY ugly stuff). She didn't really know how to get away from him, but she didn't care if the relationship fell apart. She just needed someone who would listen to and believe HER. We were casually talking in the college student union when he walks through (after he'd flunked out of school) and threatens to kill me if I don't leave immediately. I figured that was it, it was either me or her, and I wasn't about to let anything happen to her again--even if it means I have to be this guy's punching bag. She convinced me she could handle things, so I left. But basically that spelled the end of their relationship. I managed to hang onto her long enough that she didn't go back to him. After another scary incident, we finally decided to get the police involved and were lucky that we didn't have any more problems after that.
I took a lot of criticism from so-called friends and even one of my professors for what happened. But I've never "just let it go" since then. People say you should mind your own business. Well, what happens to my friends IS my business. I think if more children learned that early on, there'd be much less to worry about from situations like what happened to that girl.
I think even my son gets it, and he's only 2. We have to correct his 1-year-old sister, which just means a firm "no" or a firm tap on the wrist. The little guy reprimands US and says, "No! No hit BABY!" I really do believe that it's more than just repeating what we might have said to him a few times. He's genuinely concerned for the safety of his sister, and I really do hope to see that kind of caring, even if it's momentarily misplaced, carry over into later phases not just with his sister, but anyone he cares about.
And that's why I say avoiding children isn't the best answer. Seriously, why is it that only SMART people are using contraceptives? I say give the smart people all the support we can, tell them to go have fun, and slip birth control into these morons' food who are giving the rest of us so much grief. It might take 4, maybe 5 generations, but at least you can overpopulate with smart people and lessen the number of people genetically predisposed to stupid behavior.
30 Mar 2010, 8:00 am
