“Sticks and Stone may break my bones, but names can never hurt me”. My mother used to make me recite that over and over whenever I came home from school with hurt feelings from some quip by a verbal sword-smith. I did it, but being the person I was and probably still am, the words lingered around my legs like a low lying fog ready to trip me up a any second.
Recently, another child has taken their life due to cyber bullying. This was a 15-year-old girl in Massachusetts (read the story: http://tinyurl.com/yeox9tk ).
Bullying, teasing, trash-talking is not a new sport for the teenage crowd. The new cyber frontier and cellular text land is a dangerous place for our kids these days. These taunts go beyond the name-calling of 30-plus years ago. They are so inappropriate in language and accusation that I can’t even type an example. And things on the Internet can live forever. That is why the devastation can result in such dramatic results as suicide. The unfortunate truth is much of the verbal slash and slang begins with hurt feelings and spins and warps into untruths that spiral and viral into outlandish lies.
(This is one reason why I discourage chat rooms on youth pages on a website. Unless you have a twenty-four hour cyber-monitor, your forum can turn into an unwanted unintentional problem. It can even go as far as to make your organization or church liable should violence ensue.)
Where your organization or church CAN make a difference is through working as a mediator when cyber/text conflict arises. I recently watched a PBS special on teen girl violence. Where boys may walk away after a fight, girls let it fester and this festering is the seed that can spiral out of control into physical or cyber-violence. The answer needed to calm girls from this destruction seemed to be the simple, earnest apology.
What has happened to us that we can’t say those words? We don’t seem to know how to apologize or how to admit a mistake. As I type this blog, I hear the voice of the television commentator recanting recent stories with the Tiger Woods saga. Here is a stellar example of where telling the truth, saying you’re sorry and admitting a mistake would have left a lot of air time open on our tv’s.
We need to teach our young people and apparently, ourselves, the powerful tools of apology and admittance of wrong. The more we run from these strong tenets of decorum, the more we degrade society and lean ever closer a land of chaff where wheat will not grow.
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