I've been a little dubious about the wave of 'bullying' that seems to sweeping through the media and our culture lately. I don't doubt that kids get bullied. I was picked on a lot as a kid and I emerged with my essential weirdness intact, free from jail or a criminal record and with a steady job to boot.
For the record: this wasn't just normal teasing either. I was blessed with an exceptionally large noggin and kids can be total assholes to each other. Basketball Head gave way to AirHead- there was a brief period in Junior High where Melon was popular before I found a corner of my high school with people as strange as me (Newslab) and things settled into the more or less acceptable to me moniker of Head. Which was descriptive and accurate in my mind and by that point the not so pointed questions of "What size baseball cap do you wear?" had long since ceased to bother me.
That's not say it hasn't left it's mark on me though. I tend to run alone. I don't join things. I avoid sports/work leagues like the plague primarily because I suck at sports and while people always insist 'we're just doing it for fun' there's always some hyper-competitive dipshit that will go out of their way to make it as un-fun as possible. When some little prick in Boy Scouts wanted to call our sub-group thing 'Three Twigs and A Balloon' I just quit. It wasn't worth it if it wasn't going to make me happy.
So yeah, bullying does exist. But there's a wave of zero tolerance policies and cases of suicides sweeping the land that have me feeling old. Have kids really changed that much? Is humanity fundamentally doomed when people torment each other to the point where someone wants to end their own life? Why are people shitheads? And while you can argue that maybe bullying and learning to deal with assholes is just sort of the process of growing up (it sort of is, to some degree- after all, your boss could be an asshole and you have to learn how to deal with that) does social media just amplify it and make it that much worse?
I remain dubious: I really don't want to think that kids are ten times the assholes they were back when I was a kid but evidence is mounting to the contrary... and then, from the NFL of all places comes the case of Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin.
Barrels of ink are going to be spent talking about this case: Jason Whitlock's take is worth reading, Grantland weighed in with a good piece. And despite the lamentable amount of players standing by Incognito, some- including Brandon Marshall and Terrelle Pryor and standing up and calling 'bullshit' on a culture where things like that are acceptable.
What bothers me about it is that Martin is getting flack for walking away. He didn't go on Sportscenter and rat everyone out. He just left. And someone asked him why and he said so. I don't think he's spewing dirty laundry all over the place. I don't think he's broken some kind of code of silence or any other bullshit like that. There's a world of difference between good natured ribbing/teasing/giving the new guy a hard time and this. This is disgusting. In a supposedly professional workplace the fact that shit like this was allowed to go on is unacceptable. Dan Patrick interview Tony Dungy about it and Dungy said flat out that he had told his veterans in Tampa and Indy that he wouldn't tolerate hazing. They grumbled about it but they dealt with it. So this bullshit about it 'being part of the culture' is stupid. As Patrick kept saying: You can change the culture.
But the thing I keep coming back to is that Martin had the courage to walk away. The man dedicated his life to the love of the game of football and that locker room was so bad that he decided that it just wasn't worth it and walked away. I don't think you get to the NFL by being half-assed with your love of football. It's what you do. It's your job. It's what you love. And the fact that he chose to walk away from that speaks volumes to me about how bad it probably really was and how much courage that would have taken.
And maybe that's a solution for bullying and a lesson for life in general. Walk away. Nothing is worth being that unhappy in your job or in your life. Facebook is just a website. Read a book or two instead. You only get one life, so you might as well try to be happy about it, right
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