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The Way the White Queen Worries
I'm a common enough worrier. I worry aggressively in advance of things, the way the White Queen cries before her broach comes undone and pricks her finger in Through the Looking Glass. There are many things that make my brow furrow many years before the fact.
Just this afternoon I had lunch with a friend whose child is in middle school and the subject turned to bullying and various horror stories she's heard from friends involving the usual roster of nastiness: fighting, taunting, email gossip, web site "slam books," and of course school administrations that take an "out of school out of mind" approach to interceding.
The possibility of my child being either bullied or bully makes me truly wretched. Felix is a bumbling baby incapable, even, of truly harassing the terrier (who is smart enough to know when to get out of the way anyway, and plenty speedy). He is a dream to me. But what if he becomes monstrous? How can I shield him and protect him?
This issue will keep hitting the news, of course. Over the weekend, the Guardian wrote about kid bullying in the UK (a "culture of violence" is blamed). I do wonder, contrarian that I am, if this is really headline-worthy or just another plug for attention. There are many famous stories about being tormented in school (in the US and the UK). Maybe some of the shock and fear we have about bullying comes from the fact that children are using technology to reach out and be abusive. Nasty mass emails, web sites, videos, instant messages are all new implements of torture and somehow seem so much more wicked and harmful than the old fashioned horrors we all had to navigate. This might not really be the case, of course, and there are surely things parents and schools should do to minimize horrendous, antisocial, even murderous behavior. As always, it is a matter of arming everyone with decent things to do- active ways to stop the badness. My friend did tell me about one successful intervention on the part of one school.* In another case, the bullied kids parents had to intercede and transplant the child into another school altogether.
I am getting ahead of myself as always. I would be better off taunting myself with different horrors, things that are more of the moment. Fortunately, there is a Photoshop contest on that will help encourage more lively nightmares. I don't really need more phobias, but perhaps some different ones would be novel.
*Apparently, what worked was the school forcing the bullies and their victim to eat lunch together with a counselor for quite a long time. After however many weeks they were finally left to their own devices, and they had, in fairy tale fashion, become lunch friends at least and continued to eat together. Who knows if this works forever, but it is a comforting story.
posted by Elise at 1:08 PM
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7/24/2006 7:23 AM
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7/24/2006 7:24 AM
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7/24/2006 7:26 AM
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Hi there
Why do dogs eat their poop? One reason dogs eat their poop is because it just plain taste
good. Another reason is it could be a vitamin deficiency. One other reason for the poop
eating is that it is an instinctual behavior in the wild to eat the poop to keep other predators
from tracking their movements.
Some solutions for stopping poop eating are: You can put meat tenderizer on it.
What do you think?
By the way, I love that too! How did you find that?
Bye, bye - Wendy!
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2/08/2007 5:43 PM
said...
Hi there
Wow, I've found the same to be true too! Where did you get that at?
Bye, - MyGirl!
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2/16/2007 11:29 AM
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