Teach Your Children Well
Their Father’s Hell will Slowly go By….
~ Crosby Stills and Nash

“Why do Mr. Khrushchev and the Russian people hate me so much; they don’t even know me?”

What kind of a world does that to a youngster? A toxic one. If that’s not child abuse, I don’t know what is. It also fits the definition of global “bullying.” The world bullied a whole generation of children and they later fought back by demanding some kind of sanity

“Why are kids committing suicide?” in culture and social order. That same irony is encountered when adults ask:

“Why are these kids bullying each other?”
“

Where do they get these ideas?”

Where? Look around you.

Every time you take your child to the supermarket, you expose him to a gauntlet of bullying—a display placed perfectly at child’s eyelevel that showcases and demonstrates effectively how to bully people by publicly, and with enthusiasm and glee, making fun of their vulnerabilities and imperfections. You demonstrate to her that the world demands impossible standards and perfection while at the same time ridiculing those who don’t measure up. You sanction capitalizing on morbid curiosity, envy, and feeding the shadow side of human nature—all with your silence. Silence in the face of bullying in words and images, and particularly publishing it in the public domain, and promoting it to a wide audience is… well… permission.

Can you count how many times have you escorted your child through this gauntlet that hardens the heart, bypasses values and distorts any humanity or compassion in the mind of its observers? If you shop for groceries once a week, by the time your child is ten, he will have negotiated this passageway of bullying more than 500 times. How many trips through this tunnel of human of horror do you think it takes to condition a young mind to verbal and literary violence? Your silence sanctions bullying and instills values that find bulling is permissible and even acceptable. And profitable because it’s OK to gain from or make money off the missteps or misfortune of others”—some of those ‘others’ include the world’s most prolific artists.

Yet we wonder how young people can be so cruel as to bully other students by posting publicly humiliating materials on Facebook and Twitter? We condemn and penalize them for uploading YouTub

e videos that humiliate their peers? We condone it so why shouldn’t they? Often that is what Facebook becomes—a platform for cruelty. That is what Twitter can do in real time.  And cutting and heartless comments can be found on articles, websites and YouTube.

Take a close look at the adult world. What bullying do you see adults engaging in? What do you see them role-modeling to youth who are watching and assimilating this whole ecosystem? The toxic list is long: the abysmal lack of environmental stewardship; exploitation of the Indigenous; mismanagement of land, oceans, water, air; the greedy hoarding of earth’s resources that principally belong to all by those who wish to exploit them as commodities and commerce; the skewed, manipulated and exploited economy; climate change; artificial agriculture and food production; political indifference; the abuse of power and influence; the mistreatment of animals—domestic and agricultural; land grabs and mismanagement; the collective psychic disconnection and denial of responsibility; the moral vacuum in business and commerce; racism; double standards; the widening spiritual vacuum; the abuse from authority figures and law enforcement; the trampling of human and civil rights; slavery; conflict; gentrification; genocide; war…

Look at the most popular Western Culture television shows. Prime Time TV is filled with reality shows that promote separation and survival accompanied by some kind of verbal or physical violence that exploits people for “entertainment” value. Even the popular shows that are supposed to be about law and justice, reciprocity and teach responsibility for one’s actions, feature judges who ridicule and bully the litigants in their filmed courtroom dramas. Consider the “tribal” shows that foster divisiveness and applaud conspiracy and cunning in the marginalization and banishment of someone from the “tribe.”

The real tribal elders encouraged community and cooperation and used banishment only as a last resort because it was a sure death sentence to expel someone from the tribe. It’s become a post-modern epidemic and is now standard fare.

Children perceive that adults are “in charge of the world” and those adults are their role models. They look to adults to learn from.

Children don’t emulate what you say; they mirror what you do.

‘The tribe has spoken’ and the children are watching.

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(Reprinted from the 4th Edition of “Words and Violence”)
– See more at: http://voiceseducation.org/node/7869#sthash.dXn0906X.dpuf

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What do you think can be done about this? Your comments are welcome.