A little girl shoots herself in her backyard because she had been teased terribly at school for her crooked, thick-lipped, smile, the legacy of brain surgery performed when very young and which saved her life. Like many insecure girls, I'm sure she thought she was hideous, and I'm sure the
(more) girls at school thought they were enforcing a certain standard of acceptability through shaming and humiliation when they called her "ugly" or "fishlips" again and again. By the impossible standards of a schoolgirl, maybe she was ugly, but too young to realize that adulthood offers hope and freedom and happiness apart from such narrow childhood definitions of what ugly or pretty looks like. In this tiny crushing chamber of youth, this girl gets broken, and no one is attentive enough to her pain, or is close enough to help gather the pieces, or show her the kind of love that would help her reassemble her fractured self. So she retrieves the proper instrument from the cupboard, walks out back, and makes everything go away. Her mother is inconsolable, the principal perplexed. We knew she had been bullied, and we put up anti-bullying posters. Who could still be doing this?
Bullying is the common term for a method by which we instill fear. We lower our horned heads and charge at the target. We intend to cow them, to make them timid. We work them over, then walk away. If we've done our job right, the victim becomes her own bully, and all we have to do is remind her from time to time as to who's worthless, who's ugly, who's stupid? This training works very well, and is employed under a variety of names through institutions worldwide. But not in our school, we don't do that here. (less)
