Bullies: A Community Problem

There is such a prevailing culture of cynicism, incivility and incitement in the nation at large that perhaps we should not be surprised at a single, disturbing, violent incident of school bullying on Martha’s Vineyard. Though many students seem to feel quite removed from the recent bullying incident at the regional high school, where threats and fisticuffs left one student suspended and facing assault charges and another student too fearful to return to the school, other students took this as an opportunity to express the anxieties they feel in their daily school life.

All of our community, parents or not, ought to pause at these events to consider how we influence the youth around us.

Because while it can be difficult for adults to see when some ordinary interpersonal conflicts between kids cross the line into bullying, it is exponentially more difficult for children, particularly young schoolchildren, to work out how to behave with empathy and civility while the adults around them are constantly raging.

Whether online, on television or over coffee, vitriol seems to be the fastest way to recognition — a book deal, a celebrity profile, a reaction.

In his recently published book Snark, author David Denby notes there is a “tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true . . . Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter.”

And if this is our culture, how do children begin to understand the boundaries of good behavior, of being kind and civil to others even when you do not like them, even when they are not like you? We are their models. Cynicism is demoralizing for young people trying to fashion their own ideals, and the constant carping counters kids’ ability to be confident in who they are.

Anger is contagious. So often we summarily dismiss those with whom we disagree as being ignorant and those who have done wrong as irredeemably evil — be they in our private life or the masters of Wall Street or the Catholic Church. When we do this we teach our children to divide and fight rather than to find consensus and understanding.

When children and young people bully, we ask the bullies to consider how the other person might feel, and the victims to consider whether there was more motivating the bully than pure meanness. Yet we in the grownup world show few signs of taking such a sophisticated approach ourselves.

On the Island there are issues of skin color, birthplace and wealth that did not divide us so a generation ago. An expert who noted the “gauntlet of cruelty” on the Vineyard said in this paper seven years ago, “We’ve been teasing and bullying for years, but as the anxiety of our lives goes up, it becomes more pronounced, it gets more hurtful and we lose the compassion and sense of people. And it’s more pronounced on the Island as you become more diversified.”

Let us not only hope this incident was an isolated one, let us work to make ourselves a genuinely more civil community.