The one negative thing I can say is this: The town hasn’t learned their lesson.
The parents are failing still. Too many people thought the solution would be to call and bully the families of the bullies. To excuse bullying in one case is to open the door for others. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Shame on you, town of Greece. Named after the inventors of democracy, as in “people having power”, clearly you have abused your freedom of speech, and you do not deserve the power given to you, but instead you carelessly extort the power you have to hurt or heal others with speech. Apology is what breaks the cycle of verbal abuse, not more verbal abuse.
Hear about those kids who bullied the bus monitor? I’ll let you read the full story below, which includes the harrowing video documenting the incident.
So here’s the thing: These kids have a lack of empathy. It’s primarily a parenting issue. Their parents are failing. That being said, here is what the school needs to do. We’ll call this the “shame and flame” deterrent:
1. The kids don’t ride the bus next year. Their parents have to take them to school. But, if they get a driver’s license, they have to ride the bus until they graduate.
2. Call an assembly in which every child on that bus (all of them, because in the recording none stood up for her) must apologize to directly to her, with their parents or guardians standing behind them, who will then apologize on their behalf as well. If a student refuses to apologize, they must refuse in front of the entire school so everyone knows
3. In that assembly, a letter will be read in praise of this woman and signed by every single other student in the school. Then the students who apologized have to write every word they said to her on a piece of paper and burn it. This last portion may be performed outside the assembly if necessary.
4. The school should beef up their anti-bullying endeavors according to how the PTA and student body see fit. This is primarily the parents’ jobs, but seeing as how you can’t rely on American parents to teach their kids how to nurture empathic intelligence, the rest of the community can pick up where they miserably left off.
5. And don’t give me any crap about good kids with good parents succumbing to peer pressure. They continued while the woman cried. “Kids will be kids” is a profane motto to utter in this scenario. Peer pressure is not a free pass to unleash evil.
The following is a clip from the documentary “American Tongues”
(beware of the use of a derogatory term, supported neither by myself nor, I imagine, the documentarians)
What’s your language prejudice?
When I was younger I had a lot. A little bit against ebonics, but most against redneck talk. I had friends who looked down on rurality and quaintness and so I did the same.
My dad swears up and down I used to correct his grammar a lot. I don’t remember doing that. What I did do was critique his pronunciation. That’s phonetics, not grammar. It did kill me when I was twelve and he would sit down at a Roanoke restaurant and say “weaww wa wah-er”. The waitress would ask him to repeat, and he would switch to a slow, punctuated version of the same pronunciation: “We. aww. wawn. waher.” At least, that’s how it sounded to me.
Now I’m much more tolerant of dialectical variation, thought I do recommend pronouncing your words according to your context, Dad.
But one thing I will teach my son is there is no “right English.” The closest thing to a standard is only standardized because it is used by those in power. It does not make you smarter. And even the most notorious “errors”, such as “he be goin’ to the store,” operate based on certain rules. Double negatives (“don’t have none”) were used by Chaucer, as were consonental metatheses (“Can I axe you a question”). Is a person dumber or more likely to join a gang because they say “axe”, or are they actually intelligent enough to adapt to the practicality of our English-trained tongues placing the velar stop prior to the post-alveolar sibilant fricative?
So as a teacher I teach my students the same thing I’ll teach my son. Learn to code switch. Some people want you to wear a coat and a tie to certain functions. Oblige them if you want to please them and get what you want from them. If it insults your sense of self identity, don’t do it. As a teacher I have to teach students how to writer “proper,” but it’s no more proper than their own tongue.
One of the miraculous gifts given to the apostles was the ability to speak in tongues. They spoke and everyone understood. They didn’t demand everyone learn Greek. or Hebrew. In fact, the language of the Bible is not the ritzy, “proper” Greek, but street Greek, barnyard Greek, the language of simple merchants and traders. Then there’s the good book story of the “shibboleth”, where one Palestinian tribe slaughtered the other, using their inability to pronounce a syllable as an excuse.
How do you view people based on how they talk? Do you judge them by their pronunciations, the grammatical rules to which they adhere, their colloquialisms? Or do you consider instead the content of their words, whether they be hateful or considerate, wise or foolish, critically incisive or muddling?
What’s your language prejudice, and what does it say about you? I submit that it tells me more about you than your own dialect does. Ain’t no buts about it.
Thus has been signaled my new (and more permanent) blog, as well as the welcoming of my new son to the world (for those of you who didn’t know, I had a son a month ago today).
Our first Father’s Day brings a reflection of the first month: Eat, sleep, lose sleep, adore baby, watch baby eat and sleep and poop. Stay up letting him sleep on me while I play Skyrim so his mother can sleep. Go to class to learn how to teach grammar—not the Miss Fiddlesnitch way, banging a ruler on the desk and telling the little farmer’s son there’s something wrong with him for saying “ain’t”, but rather teaching kids to code-switch to talk like Miss Fiddlesnitch so prejudiced crackers can give them a job.
So on Father’s Day four generations assembled in one house: Noah, myself, my dad, my granddad. My mother took a picture. It was monumental to say the least. I really am ushering in a new chapter in my life. Gonna take a few things more seriously. Gonna take a few things less seriously. Gonna take time to rethink some things. Begin some things anew. And some things gonna keep doing the same, and not cease at.
I’ll talk on some things or others. The topics will relate mostly to the spiritual, but what I have learned is that all things are spiritual, have a spiritual dimension. There is no such thing as a “spiritual topic”, but rather topics that we either suck the spirit out of or simply talk on without regards to their spiritual dimension or application. I’ll ramble some days and tweet the other. That reminds me, up next is a twitter. I need to crawl out of this cave. My grandfather is catching up with me, learning how to use e-mail and whatnot. Just yesterday he was sending smoke signals. I can’t imagine what Noah will be using when he’s my age.
So welcome to my new blog. Read. Interact. Share. And by all means, keep your comments to yourself. Then, after about fives minutes have passed, return to your computer, review your comment, and post it. This isn’t YouTube, for crying out loud. There are consequences.
CALEB COY 