Aguila Blanca
Staff
Someone mentioned the elephant in the room. There are more than one elephant, and one of them is bullying. And reports are now coming out -- from fellow students -- that this shooter was bullied. The Parkland kid was somewhat of an outcast --- I don't know if he was "bullied," but he wasn't exactly the homecoming king. The two shooters at Columbine were social outcasts. If we dug into all the school shootings between Columbine and Santa Fe I suspect we'd find a lot more of the shooters were bullied or in some way excluded from the society of the student population in general.
But the schools don't want tio deal with it, because they don't want to face the answer. I saw it, up close and personal. My adopted daughter was bullied at our local high school (where, many years before, I was captain of the tennis team and class president) to the point of having a nervous breakdown and not being able to set foot on the school property. I complained to the point of the federal Department of Education conducting a six-month investigation -- at the end of which they concluded that there had been no bullying. That's how well the school covered it up. Privately, a teacher in the school told me that of course it happened. She knew because the same thing had happened to her own son, two years before. And the school simply denied that it happened in her case, too.
Could it be that my adopted daughter has a severe case of special snowflake-itis? She does tend in that direction, and I recognize it. But ... we enrolled her in a private, parochial school and she excelled. So it wasn't entirely in her imagination. A huge difference is that the parochial school doesn't let the inmates run the asylum. The teachers are strict, and they don't tolerate bullying. At the local high school, the teachers look the other way because they don't want to deal with it. Same with the administration. So they pull a Sergeant Schulz -- "I saw nussing, I know nussing!"
We, as a nation, need to start getting serious about stopping bullying.
But the schools don't want tio deal with it, because they don't want to face the answer. I saw it, up close and personal. My adopted daughter was bullied at our local high school (where, many years before, I was captain of the tennis team and class president) to the point of having a nervous breakdown and not being able to set foot on the school property. I complained to the point of the federal Department of Education conducting a six-month investigation -- at the end of which they concluded that there had been no bullying. That's how well the school covered it up. Privately, a teacher in the school told me that of course it happened. She knew because the same thing had happened to her own son, two years before. And the school simply denied that it happened in her case, too.
Could it be that my adopted daughter has a severe case of special snowflake-itis? She does tend in that direction, and I recognize it. But ... we enrolled her in a private, parochial school and she excelled. So it wasn't entirely in her imagination. A huge difference is that the parochial school doesn't let the inmates run the asylum. The teachers are strict, and they don't tolerate bullying. At the local high school, the teachers look the other way because they don't want to deal with it. Same with the administration. So they pull a Sergeant Schulz -- "I saw nussing, I know nussing!"
We, as a nation, need to start getting serious about stopping bullying.