NC school tells boy,9, to leave My Little Pony lunch bag at home, report says | Fox News:
North Carolina school officials are telling a 9-year-old North Carolina [boy] who has been bullied for bringing a My Little Pony lunch bag to school to leave the bag at home. Grayson Bruce and his mother say he is being shoved around by school bullies who think his favorite bag is for girls.
Bruce's mom objects to the solution chosen by 'school officials'; they think the lunch bag is a target for bullies, so Grayson should be responsible for the solution ... by giving something that is, apparently, important to him.
School Officials are all about one thing: "Don't Make Waves". There's an old adage about nails that stick up; they get hammered down.
School bullies keep making it into the news, but they don't seem to be the problem. Or rather, they ARE the problem, but knoody knows what to do about them.
This is school-yard violence at its best. Or at its worst, depending on your point of view. It's not just the nine year old boys who pick on the weakest ... that's just normal human crap.
The real bullies are the 'school officials' who can't control violence by disciplining the perpetrators, so they discipline the innocent victims. Why? Because they know that the bullies won't listen to them, but the victim ... well, he's already shown that he won't rebel against their authority.
"Always take the easy ones first". That's the motto of violence and this is the way it has been since Urg discovered the club and earned for himself the starring role in
the opening scene of "
2001: A Space Odyssey".
*
"School officials" are drawn from the enlisted ranks of "educators", who are caretakers. They are not predisposed to violence and so in general they are also appeasers.
(Although I recall Mr. Boyle from Junior High, who delighted in paddling boys who acted up in class. We called him "The Enforcer" and we were always
demonstrating our Best Behavior in his 8th grade Algebra class; not so
much because he hurt us, but because he enjoyed it so.)
Thus it is that in a gentle society, it doesn't take much Violence to cow not only the intended victim, but also the people who are suppose to protect the victim .. the adults.
A society which has lately focused itself on reducing "Gun Violence" does so by eliminating guns; they do nothing to reduce violence, or violent behavior. It doesn't matter if it's a fist, a club or a gun, the weapon is not the issue. It's the permission of those who are nominally in authority which not only fails to protect the victims, but which effects the promotion of violence.
When aggressive behavior is promoted, even passively (by a failure of 'authority' to require civilized demeanor), then it is encouraged.
Again, it's not the accoutrements to violence which encourages violent behavior. It's not the fist, or the club, or the gun. And it's not the stigmata of the victim. There will always be convenient victims. It's the societal acceptance of violent behavior which institutionalizes it.
You can't control, for example, "gun violence" by focusing and restricting the gun. You have to focus on the violence, and the causes of violent behavior.
This is much more difficult than passing laws against the possession of a gun, any more than you can do so by passing laws against the possession of a club .. or a fist. When there are already thousands of laws which regulate and restrict firearms ownership, we still have a Chicago or a Washington (DC) which employ the most stringent restrictions on guns, and yet they are among the most violent cities in an admittedly violent country.
Laws don't help protect the victims, because they don't address the root cause. There are no convenient laws which will solve the problems. It's not a legal ill. It's a societal ill.
And our legislators, the men and women to whom we look to address and redress societal ills ... they find it much more convenient to pass more laws than to resolve the root causes of violence in America.
We're asking too much of them.
They don't have the solution, but they try. In this case, the solution is part of the problem.
The problem is that we don't have a sense of community in America. We think we do, but we do not. The "Melting Pot" is a dream that doesn't come true, because we haven't yet found a way to combine the virtues of our sub-cultures to effect George H.W. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light" (which, if I seem to speak dismissively .. I do; great visions unaccomplished are failures, and we have enough individual failures here already.)
I've said this before, and I will say it again. The Greater Solution is "The Family". When men no longer indulge in irresponsible sex outside of marriage, and then leave without assuming the responsibility to guide the life they have created ...
.. when the women whom they impregnate, and then leave without supporting the family they have created, allow the creation of a family without the support they should have required ...
... when the children they have fathered, and who are then left without the morally responsible guidance of the fathers who have abandoned their progeny, have no role model to guide them in their path through adolescence to responsible adulthood ....
... then no laws passed by the legislature will have any effect upon their progression to violence as a way to life.
93% of the 'bullies' in any given school come from "Broken Homes". It's a frightening statistic, isn't it?
I thought so. I just made it up.
I have no reason to think that it's either inaccurate, or that we should dismiss it as the most significant factor when we consider Violence in America.
POST NOTES:
*"This scene shows the beggining (sic) of the Paleolithic Era of prehistory, and reveals that, by the management of tools, man could stop being a victim of the world to become an active element, who has the power of action over the nature."
